According to the newly approved Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills for Social Studies standards “The primary purpose of Texas and American social studies is to educate students to become responsible, self-governing citizens who respect the rights of their fellow citizens and who cherish liberties and laws.” To promote “responsible” citizenship in the Lone Star State, the high school standards are laced with Islamophobic statements, justifications for slavery, the glorification of Christianity, Western Civilization, and capitalism, and leave out significant portions of Texas history. After all, in MAGA world, “Ignorance is Bliss.”

This is a curriculum guide that Donald Trump would love, if he read it. The Texas Republican Party website claims the new standards support Trump’s campaign that “schools provide patriotic education that instills admiration for our nation and rejects indoctrination in radical, anti-American ideologies.” In support of the standards, MAGA Republican Congressional Representative Chip Roy accused “The Marxist-Islamist alliance” of mobilizing to “remove the current factual standards revealing the truth about the violent, aggressive actions of the promoters of Islam.”

Examining the Texas State Board of Education high school standards, I couldn’t find any mention of the Comanche, the Apache or the Tonkawa, the original Native American inhabitants of the area that became Texas; how the Texas War for Independence was fought to protect slavery, which was illegal when Texas was part of Mexico; or that Texas fought with the Confederacy during the Civil War. The Tulsa Race Riots are included, but not who was rioting (whites) and who were the victims (African Americans). According to the Texas State Historical Commission, 339 African Americans were lynched by white mobs in Texas between 1885 and 1942, but that is not mentioned in the high school standards so apparently it is not considered “essential knowledge.”

In Texas, “students understand the benefits of the United States free enterprise system, also referred to as capitalism or the free market system. This system, predicated on limited government and strong property rights, emphasizes the individual exercise of economic decisions without government interference, allowing people the opportunity to prosper.” Missing are the negatives – periodic economic downturns, structural inequality, the underfunding of essential social services, and climate change that has a devastating and deadly impact on the environment in Texas.

Slavery is to be taught as something that “existed in many societies throughout history, including at the time of colonization, among some Indigenous peoples in America, in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, and earlier, in ancient civilizations.” Students don’t learn about the unique characteristics of slavery in the Americas, the United States, and Texas where it is based on race, the enslaved are property, not human beings, the Chrisian Bible is used to justify slavery; and it is the foundation of the agricultural economy of the South, provides the raw material for Northern industrialization, slave-produced commodities are the country’s chief export, and leads the country into Civil War. During the 17th and 18th centuries Christian Great Britain was the world’s largest slave-trading nation. But the only thing students learn from these standards is that the Christian religion’s belief in the inherent dignity and rights of all people, something apparently missing in the American South, led to the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and “influenced movements to end slavery around the world.”

The biases against Islam in standards that promote Christianity as the bedrock of Western Civilization and American history are pronounced. The Prophet Mohammed is accused of brutal military campaigns against Christians and Jews; the teachings of jihad are blamed for the Islamic conquest of Christian lands during the European Middle Ages; and Radical Islam is the cause of terrorism today. Students are expected to learn about slavery in the Islamic world, but not that it was less extensive and less cruel than Christian chattel slavery in the Americas and that in the Islamic world enslaved people maintained their human status. Missing in the high school standards is that it was European Christians that invaded Islamic lands during the Crusades and looted Jewish sites; any mention of the Islamic Golden Age and contributions to mathematics and science; the Islamic world preservation the teachings of ancient Greece and Rome; the expansion of Islam into sub-Sahara Africa bringing literacy and numeracy; and the liberatory Islamic challenge to caste in India and feudalism in parts of Europe;

To graduate, high school students must be able to denounce Texan LBJ’s Great Society efforts to abolish poverty and racial inequality as the much hated DEI and cite how the Reverend Martin Luther King, jr. used Biblical references in his speeches and writings. Of course, King, like Johnson, wanted to abolish poverty and racial inequality believing they violated Christian teachings and he also opposed the war in Vietnam, a war the standards present as a necessary effort to prevent the spread of communism.