Truth in biases

An article in the New York Times last week described yet another issue that the Texas Board of Education took with their history textbooks.  The board accused that the new books assert a “pro-Islamic bias” and an anti-Christian agenda, and members worry about the influence such heretical material might have on the minds of their precious wee ones.

My favorite part of that article is this next quote by one of the Texas Board of Ed members: “If you can control or influence our education system, you can start taking over the minds of the young people.”  This statement is completely and totally 100 percent true and is a delightful clarification of just what the board is doing: by removing a supposedly anti-Christian agenda from textbooks and replacing it with no agenda or, more likely, a pro-Christian, anti-Muslim agenda, the board tells Texan young’uns that a pro-Christian, anti-Muslim attitude is the right one regarding history and religion.

Are you appalled?  I hope you are. It’s when I reflect on current events like these that I feel the most gratitude for my upbringing without such poisonous fertilizer.  I like to consider the more unique and interesting courses we’ve taken ­— environmental geography, perhaps, farm stories or positive methods of discipline, maybe, or a lab course that taught us how to clone other organisms — and consider what we’ve learned.  In some of the courses I’ve taken, I’ve learned to disregard standardized test scores for better methods of assessment, I’ve learned to vote for Obama and adopt liberal political views, I’ve learned to recycle — oh man, have I learned to recycle — and I have learned to prescribe ADD medications to those who exhibit the qualifying symptoms.  These are lessons that my teachers (professors and otherwise) believe are important and would benefit me in my current and future life ... just like members of the Texas Board of Education believe an anti-Muslim, pro-Christian view of history would benefit the students in their public schools ...

But, but, wait.  This is a silly comparison because our endeavors of activism for the environment or for cloning or religious freedom or sexual health or women’s rights are different, right?  We’re trying to improve the world by fighting for these worthy causes!

Well of course we think so!  They are our biases!  These beliefs resonate with us and have since growing up.  In fact, we chose Middlebury because our particular sets of biases align with those that the administration designates as educational philosophy; we wanted to cultivate these biases during our time in college, and thus bought into their devious and manipulative marketing scheme.  We, too, are host organisms for a specified vector of belief systems and we target other non-believing host species as antagonistic, just as they do to us.  We are no different from the students affected by the Texas Board of Education, or from the board of educators themselves.

Now, I am not saying at all that my personal bias for freedom of religion (for which I am almost imperviously in favor) is wrong, nor do I believe that the misshapen facts so kindly illuminated for us by the Board of Education are right, and I’m sure as hell not the World’s Foremost Liberal Environmental Activist.  But there is some hypocrisy to silencing someone else for their bias when another of my own is open-mindedness toward other beliefs.  In fact, it seems in stark contrast to that principle to do so.

I’ve now arrived at an impasse.  What the hell do we do now? I don’t know what you should do, but, despite everything I’ve just said, I know what I’m going to.

By the way, I do think we should all read fiction.  The great irony of literature is that each plotline is made up, and yet I have found more integrity and truth in most prose than in most nonfiction writing.  Of course every author is biased — no novelist worth reading isn’t — but at least they don’t pretend they’re not, like in newspapers and in history books.