Doomed to Repeat It...

Dear Texas State Board of Education,

My name is Bridget. I am 25 years old. I have a Master's degree in Imperial and Commonwealth History. I have no job, I am unable to collect unemployment and I have a truly abysmal health insurance plan. I am also, most likely in your eyes, a raging left wing radical revolutionary lunatic.

Why, you ask? Because I believe that human beings--and I include children as humans, which seems to be another point against me--have the ability to think for themselves.

You see, I've been reading a great deal about this new curriculum you approved a few days back, and I just wanted to share my thoughts. Which, I realize, you probably couldn't care less to hear. But more on that later.

See this man up there? That's Thomas Jefferson. He was a pretty cool guy. He played the violin. He wrote a pretty important document, called the Declaration of Independence; you may have read it--most likely in a history book. He invented a music stand and the dumbwaiter. He was the ambassador to France and made the American government pay to ship home his 37 trunks of books that he collected during his time in Europe. For that reason alone I think he was pretty fantastic. But you decided to strike him from your history books because he also came up with the theory of "separation of Church and State".

And this is kind of the root of the problem that I have with you. It's not so much that you have an opinion. If no one had an opinion about history, or allowed history to have an opinion of us, then the world would be made of nothing more than a few dates and some big buildings. But instead, we have stories. Stories about the pyramids and about amphitheaters and mosques; stories about monsters in the sea and demons in the air and stories about the people who dreamed them up and who made them real; stories about heroes and villains and cowards and people who did nothing more remarkable than to survive. And every single one of those stories is precious.

And in this country, we have some pretty great stories. About people who were willing to pack up their lives, packed up their families, and their pasts and brought it to the middle of an impossible wilderness; people who believed in cities on hills and in angels who wrote on sheets of gold. They did some pretty remarkable things: they mined canyons, they built railroads, they invented the banjo, and they invented silly putty. They also enslaved and killed and destroyed and defiled. They lied and they cheated and did a great deal of terrible things, believing that what they did was Right.

You, my dear Board of Education, are some of those people. Because in denying your children part of that story, you are not simply mis-educating them. You are denying them a piece of themselves. I don't care very much at all whether you like Thomas Jefferson. But you have a duty to tell your children who he was and what he did with his life. Just as you have a duty to tell your children who Ronald Reagan and Joe McCarthy were and what they did for the brief amount of time they breathed on this earth. It is part of an educator's job to tell children what they need to know.

But how dare you presume that you have the right to tell your children how to think?

I am physically unable at this point to care less about your thoughts on the separation of Church and State. However, it exists. It is a point of fact, not debate and not contention, that the United States of America was founded in the hopes that all its citizens would be free to worship where they pleased and vote for whom they pleased, without the two actions affecting each other. It is not your job to tell children whether that idea was "right" or "wrong". It is your job to explain why the Founding Fathers felt that to be such an important part of the government. I would start with the example of a group of radical right-wing Christians attempting to write a history book might be a very good one. But regardless of my opinions here, this is part of the story of American history. On a purely objective level, it leaves a black hole throughout your curriculum: without Church and State, you have no reason to explain the role of missionaries in the founding of the American West, though without Native Americans, there really is no story to tell there...or the Women's Rights Movement, oh wait, that would involve mentioning women, which doesn't seem to be part of your plan either...or the writing of the American Constitution and the Bill of Rights--or does that no longer exist at all?

From a subjective point of view, how is it advantageous to you to raise a generation of automatons? What good does it do you to raise a state full of children who cannot think for themselves what their country was, is, and could be? Why is it so terrifying to you to teach children what the separation of Church and State means? If your truth is so universal, so potent and so right, why can't they figure it out for themselves? Frankly, there is a hell of a lot of evidence throughout history that you might have a point--from the Mayflower Compact to that Moral Majority you are so fond of referencing, America has never been able to get God out of the Courts or government out of the pulpit. So let's talk about it, for pity's sake. I don't want to take Ronald Reagan or the NRA out of your text books. I don't want to write a manifesto of left-wing doctrine, either. I just want to present a curriculum that allows children to see the many sides of the issues that exist in American History and to make their decisions based on all the available evidence, no matter how unpleasant, ugly or contrary to my personal beliefs they may be. There is no harm in discussing anything--unless you are afraid that a frank discussion might show you up as the fools you really are.

There are no morals to history. Things happened. People thought things and people did things. And whether they turned out to be right or turned out to be mistaken, there is no excuse for removing them because they don't fit in with your world view. What if I decide that I don't agree with the politics of Henry Ford (which I don't, but that is beside the point)? Am I allowed to deny one of the most revolutionary inventions in modern history, turn my back on the man who invented the assembly line and who made ambulances and fire trucks and jet engines possible because he was a Nazi sympathizer? Can I forget the automobile because of a P-Ship? Of course not. But what I can do, is to show someone both sides of the individual and let them decide for themselves what kind of man he was, and what kind of inventor and where the good outweighs the bad.

I can show Thomas Jefferson as a politician who was willing to postpone abolition in favor of a revolution, as a man who might have slept with his slaves; as an inventor and a musician who wrote his own epitaph and neglected to mention that he was the President of the United States. I can do this because I don't believe history is something to be feared. I think it is something to be revered as the basis for who we are as individuals, as a country and as a species. You can mold it and shape it and pare it all you want, but I promise you, there will come a day when all those children you are attempting to hoodwink will wake up.

And they will realize that yes, there were Communists working in America, but there will be some who will want to know why, and they will learn about the oppression of American thinkers and artists, of the lockouts and shakedowns and riots and murders that made those people believe in Communism. They will realize that they believed in their cause just as much as McCarthy did his, and a great number of people suffered because of it.

They will wonder why it is that "men gave women the vote" in 1919, and they will find out about all those women who starved and were force-fed until they drowned, and were raped and burned and trampled in order to say who their president would be. They will learn about the women who worked in munitions factories until their hair fell out and their skin turned yellow and they glowed in the dark of night, believing that their sacrifice would allow their daughters some autonomy in their own country.

They will see in your books that slavery was nothing more than a relic of British Colonialism that America desired to cast off from day one. And then they will see white hoods and burning crosses on TV. They will see photos of children being pummeled by water hoses and women weeping over the bodies of their lynched husbands. They will read about slave ships and internment camps and they will read about wars and they will see the memorials in their towns and cities to the brave men who fought to preserve the union.

And you will lose, my dear State Board of Education. You will fail. Because no matter how hard you try--and many, many other fools have tried before you--you cannot hide the truth. And the truth is that American history is far more dirty, far more embarrassing, far more astounding and awe-inspiring and painful and memorable than you could ever really conceive it from within your blinders. And to force those blinders on your children is simply an act of cowardice. You are not "restoring" anything to anyone, alive or dead. You are cheating your future by removing its past. Just as so many have done before you. And you know what? They, too, failed. If history has shown anything, it is that humans are unpredictable and adaptive and that they have the ability to use their great and powerful minds, no matter how hard others try to cripple them. If you cared enough, you could find that out for yourself.

I just pray that when those historians gather around a conference table to write your story, when the time comes to remember the Texas State Board of Education who decided that their children didn't deserve to know about Thomas Jefferson and who were too weak to bear the truth about Civil Rights and who were too stupid to think for themselves, I hope they judge you more kindly than I do. I hope they can find something redemptive in your crusade to purge American History and to reshape the country so it fits into your cozy little concepts of reality. I hope they forgive you. Because I can't.

Love,

~Bridget~

PS: Neither can Thomas Jefferson.