By an 8-7 vote, the Texas State Board of Education authorized the incorporation of primarily Christian Bible-based lessons in public elementary schools from kindergarten through fifth-grade beginning in the 2025-2026 school year.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) voiced support for the program, saying in a May news release that it “will allow students to better understand the connection of history, art, community, literature, and religion on pivotal events like the signing of the U.S. Constitution, the Civil Rights Movement, and the American Revolution.”
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This measure stands on very shaky pedagogic and legal grounds by imposing a government standard on religion that directly violates the First Amendment’s right to religious freedom through the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause. It is also a continuation of a broader trend in Republican-led states seeking to integrate more religious teachings into public education.
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Patriarchal White Christian Nationalism in Public Education
In the famous words of social activist Marcus Garvey: “A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin, and culture is like a tree without roots.”
The lives, stories, and histories of marginalized people in the United States have been intentionally hidden by socially dominant individuals and groups through neglect, deletions, erasures, omissions, bans, censorship, distortions, alterations, trivializations, and other unauthorized means.
Amidst the backlash and the organized movement to ban books; restrict classroom discussions on topics related to race, sexuality, and gender; censor curricular materials; and pass laws patterned after Florida’s notorious “Stop Woke” and “Don’t Say Gay” laws, we need to place the current counteroffensive on education into historical perspective.
Patriarchal white Christian nationalism has been the foundation on which this continuing trend rests.
Though some of the terminology may have changed over the intervening years, and the country has made some monumental progressive advancements in education, some conditions remain the same.
Throughout the history of this country, schools have reproduced the cultural norms, often with the attendant range of social inequities and dominant group privileges found within the larger society.
In Colonial America, few regions aside from the larger New England towns mandated by law the building of schools or the provision of childhood instruction. Schools that were constructed and teachers who were hired were done so only because local citizens decided to pool their resources.
During this time, classroom lessons were tied directly to Protestant religions and the Protestant Bible, which the early settlers (a.k.a. land thieves) brought with them from England. School lessons primarily centered on preaching, catechizing, and prayers that called for freedom from the influences of the Devil and from attacks by indigenous native populations.
The most frequently used schoolbook was The New England Primer to teach reading as well as the Protestant catechism. Several Catholic parishes established parochial or parish schools partly due to the Protestant teachings that pervaded the public school curriculum.
Following the Revolutionary War, leaders like Thomas Jefferson called for state-supported and mandated public education, believing that the very survival of the new republic depended on an educated populace.
Jefferson, for example, advocated for a three-year publicly supported education for all white children — no such guarantees were to be extended to children of enslaved Africans — with advanced education provided to a select few males.
As Jefferson wrote, the schools will be “raking a few geniuses from the rubbish.”
Withholding Education as a Tool for Oppression
The first statewide school system was established in Massachusetts in the 1820s, largely due to the efforts of Horace Mann, the first secretary of education of any state in the United States. While traveling throughout Massachusetts, Mann found an unequal patchwork of local schools dependent on the tax base of each community. He proposed a new structure, which he called “common schools.”
These schools were to serve children of all income levels. He hoped they would help to end, or at least reduce, the financial inequities between citizens of the state.
Mann and other political and community leaders also supported a homogeneity of opinion. They argued that the main purpose of public education was for the development of good character based on religion. By that, they meant the central teachings of the Protestant Bible.
In their attempts to “civilize” and convert native peoples to Christianity, French, Spanish, and English colonists established “Indian Schools,” though most native peoples refused to attend.
In 1790, the newly constituted United States Congress passed the Naturalization Act, which excluded all nonwhites from citizenship, including Asians, enslaved Africans, and Native peoples, the latter of whom they defined in oxymoronic terms as “domestic foreigners,” even though they had inhabited the land for thousands of years.
The Congress did not grant Native Americans rights of citizenship until 1924 with the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act, though Asians continued to be denied naturalized citizenship status.
Many legislators employed scriptural justifications to support the institution of slavery, such as Ephesians 6:5-6: “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ; not only while being watched, and in order to please them, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart.”
And Luke 12:47: “That servant who knows his master’s will and does not get ready or does not do what his master wants will be beaten with many blows.”
Later, Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy, asserted: “[Slavery] was established by decree of Almighty God…it is sanctioned in the Bible, in both Testaments, from Genesis to Revelation… it has existed in all ages, has been found among the people of the highest civilization, and in nations of the highest proficiency in the arts.”
As wisely stated by English author Edward Bulwer-Lytton in his 1839 play, Richelieu; Or the Conspiracy, “The pen is mightier than the sword.” This adage holds that the written word acts as a powerful tool in the transmission of ideas.
Why else would oppressive regimes and other avid enforcers of the status quo engage in censorship and book burning?
The United States has been the only nation to forbid education to those it has enslaved. Except for imposing Christian conversion through religious instruction, legislators enacted laws making it a crime in most Southern states.
Following an enslaved people’s uprising led by abolitionist Nat Turner in 1831, some states extended the education ban to free Black people as well.
Slavers identified literacy as a direct threat to the institution of slavery and their economic dependency on the labor it provided. An 1831 North Carolina law of 1831 stated in part: “Teaching slaves to read and write, tends to excite dissatisfaction in their minds, and to produce insurrection and rebellion.”
The Code of Virginia of 1849 was passed to prevent those enslaved from assembling for religious or educational purposes, as legislators believed that education would lead to uprisings.
If enslaved people developed literacy, they would be able to read the writings of abolitionists about attempts to help people escape to the North or about the 1791-1804 slave revolution in Haiti and the end of slavery in 1833 in the British Empire.
Slavers believed that literacy would make enslaved people angry, dissatisfied, and rebellious. As stated by Washington, D.C. lawyer and clerk of the US Supreme Court, Elias B. Caldwell: “The more you improve the condition of these people, the more you cultivate their minds, the more miserable you make them, in their present state. You give them a higher relish for those privileges which they can never attain, and turn what we intend for a blessing [slavery] into a curse. No, if they must remain in their present situation, keep them in the lowest state of degradation and ignorance. The nearer you bring them to the condition of brutes, the better chance do you give them of possessing their apathy.”
With the end of slavery, the legal exclusion of education to formerly enslaved people, their children, and their descendants did not expire. Throughout the Jim Crow era and through the present day, Black people have faced de jure and then de facto segregation, underfunded schools, implicit bias from educators and school administrators, and public sentiments ripe with myths and stereotypes regarding the intellectual capacities of the African descended mind.
Following the Civil War and the passage of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, all citizens born in the U.S. or naturalized were theoretically granted the right to equal protection of the laws since it was now written that “no state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens…”
The Southern states, though, passed laws — codified in the Supreme Court ruling of Plessy v. Ferguson — justifying segregated facilities, including schools. As such, Black students attended woefully underfunded facilities that lacked even basic resources.
Central to the patriarchal Christian white supremacist conquest of territory was the concept of “Manifest Destiny”: Providence destined U.S. expansion from the Atlantic to the Pacific (“from sea to shining sea”) by the so-called “Anglo-Saxon race.” In the mind of the European, this idea justified the theft of Indigenous people’s territories and a war with Mexico.
During the eighteenth century, public schools throughout the U.S. extensively used the McGuffey Readers. Though children of several faiths attended the schools, a Protestant character infused these books. So both during colonial times and the early years of public education following the Revolutionary War, a Protestant foundation permeated schooling.
In his book Deculturalization and the Struggle for Equality: A Brief History of the Education of Dominated Cultures in the United States, Joel Spring addresses “cultural genocide,” which he defines as “the attempt to destroy other cultures” through forced acquiescence and assimilation to majority rule and cultural and religious standards. This cultural genocide works through the process of “deculturalization,” which Spring describes as “the educational process of destroying a people’s culture and replacing it with a new culture.”
A historical example of “cultural genocide” and “deculturalization” can be seen in the case of European American domination over Native American Indigenous nations, whom European Americans viewed as “uncivilized,” “godless heathens,” “barbarians,” and “devil worshipers.”
European Americans attempted to deculturalize Indigenous peoples through many means: confiscation of land, forced relocation, forced conversion to Christianity, undermining their languages, cultures, and identities, and the establishment of Christian day schools and off-reservation boarding schools where they took youth far away from their people.
Under President Rutherford B. Hayes, the U.S. government approved and developed off-reservation Indian boarding schools. The first was in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in 1879. It was run primarily by white Christian teachers and administered by Richard Pratt, a former cavalry commander in the Indian Territories.
At the schools, officials stripped Indigenous children of their cultures. They cut short the young men’s hair, forced all to wear Western-style clothing, prohibited them from conversing in their native languages, made English compulsory, destroyed their cultural and spiritual symbols, and imposed Christianity on them.
As Pratt relayed to a Baptist audience: “[We must immerse] Indians in our civilization, and when we get them under, [hold] them there until they are thoroughly soaked.”
Local and national standards for teachers, especially female teachers, may seem primitive by current standards, but strong echoes of those times resound today. For example, some districts throughout the country followed these strict rules.
1872 Rules for Teachers, from the Blackwell History of Education Museum
1. Teachers each day will fill lamps, clean chimneys.
2. Each teacher will bring a bucket of water and a scuttle of coal for the day’s session.
3. Make your pens carefully. You may whittle nibs to the individual taste of the pupils.
4. Men teachers may take one evening each week for courting purposes, or two evenings a week if they go to church regularly.
5. After 10 hours in school, teachers may spend the remaining time reading the Bible or other good books.
6. Women teachers who marry or engage in unseemly conduct will be dismissed.
7. Every teacher should lay aside from each day’s pay a goodly sum of his earning for his benefit during his declining years so that he will not become a burden on society.
8. Any teacher who smokes, uses liquor in any form, frequents pool or public halls, or gets shaved in a barber shop will give good reason to suspect his worth, intention, integrity and honesty.
9. The teacher who performs his labor faithfully and without fault for five years will be given an increase of twenty-five cents per week in his pay, providing the Board of Education approves.
1915 Rules for Women Teachers, from the Knox County Retired Teachers Association
1. You will not marry during the term of your contract.
2. You are not to keep company with men.
3. You must be home between the hours of 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. unless attending a school function.
4. You may not loiter downtown in ice cream stores.
5. You may not travel beyond the city limits unless you have the permission of the chairman of the board.
6. You may not ride in a carriage or automobile with any man unless he is your father or brother.
7. You may not smoke cigarettes.
8. You may not dress in bright colors.
9. You may under no circumstances dye your hair.
10. You must wear at least two petticoats.
11. Your dresses must not be any shorter than 2 inches above the ankle.
12. To keep the school room neat and clean, you must sweep the floor at least once daily, scrub the floor at least once a week with hot, soapy water, clean the blackboards at least once a day and start the fire at 7 a.m. so the room will be warm by 8 a.m.
Heterosexism in Education
A form of cultural imperialism for LGBTQ+ people, as is true for many ethnic and racial groups, is that they often grow up within an oppressive society that deprives them of a historical context for their lives. The larger society perpetuates the myth that they have no culture or history and that they do not constitute a bona fide community.
A crucial point in the psychology of scapegoating is the representation of, in historian John Boswell’s words, minoritized “others” as “animals bent on the destruction of the children of the majority” and dominant groups have long accused LGBTQ+ people of acting as dangerous predators concentrated on ensnaring, torturing, and devouring primarily children of the dominant group.
When demagogues play on people’s fears and prejudices by invoking these images for their own political, social, and economic gains, in more instances than not it results in loss of civil and human rights, harassment, violence, and at times, death of the “other.”
Boswell has documented the various means by which this falsification has been enacted to erase LGBTQ+ history. These sorts of discriminatory actions not only lead to the false conclusion that LGBTQ+ people have made no significant contributions to their societies but also further the isolation and invisibility of these groups.
Boswell cites as an example of heterosexist censorship a manuscript of The Art of Love by the Roman author Ovid.
A phrase that originally read, “A boys’ love appealed to me less” (Hoc est quod pueri tanger amore minus) was altered by a Medieval moralist to read, “A boy’s love appealed to me not at all” (Hoc est quod queri tanger amore nihil), and an editor’s note appearing in the margin informed the reader, “Thus you may be sure that Ovid was not a sodomite” (Ex hoc nota quod Ovidius non fuerit Sodomita).
One of the first instances of a change of gender pronouns occurred when, as Boswell stated, “Michelangelo’s grandnephew employed this means to render his uncle’s sonnets more acceptable to the public.”
We know about the figure of Sappho and her famed young women’s school on the Isle of Lesbos around the year 580, where we find the earliest known writings of love poems between women. Unfortunately, only one complete poem and several poem fragments have survived after centuries of the Catholic Church’s concerted effort to extinguish the works of these extraordinary women. In 380, an order by St. Gregory of Nazianzus demanded the torching of Sappho’s poetry, and the remaining manuscripts were ordered to be destroyed by Papal Decree in 1073.
Poet Walt Whitman’s book, Leaves of Grass, was published in 1860. The section titled “Calamus” was clearly homoerotic. Kalamos in Greek mythology turned into a reed in grief for his young male lover, Karpos, who drowned.
The Acorus calamus is the name given to a marsh plant. For Whitman, his “Calamus” poems represent the kind of love between Kalamos and Karpos. Very soon following the book’s publication, it was removed from library shelves at Harvard University and placed in locked cabinets with other books thought to undermine students’ morals. Whitman was also fired from his job at the U.S. Department of the Interior.
Radcliffe Hall’s 1928 novel, The Well of Loneliness, involved a lesbian relationship, but soon after publication it was banned and declared “obscene” by officials in both England and the U.S.
In 1933 Nazi Germany, stormtroopers invaded, ransacked, and padlocked The Institute for Sexual Sciences in Berlin, founded by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, a gay Jewish sexuality researcher. The Institute conducted early sexuality research, the precursor to the Indiana-based Kinsey Institute in the United States.
Stormtroopers torched thousands of volumes of books and research documents, calling the Institute “an international center of the white-slave trade” and “an unparalleled breeding ground of dirt and filth.”
Education is Liberation
How very ironic that today, several states are either proposing or have passed laws prohibiting the teaching of slavery and other aspects of U.S. history that are not particularly flattering.
As philosopher George Santayana reminds us: “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” But this time, we have an opportunity to avoid the mistakes of the past by speaking out against the racism and cultural genocide that surrounds us.
The current system in schooling is in opposition to the very meaning of “education,” which is derived from two Latin roots: “e,” meaning “out of,” and “ducere,” meaning “to lead” or “to draw.”
True education involves the process of drawing knowledge out of the student or leading the student toward knowledge, rather than putting or depositing information into what some educators perceive as the student’s waiting and docile mind — what the Brazilian philosopher and educator Paulo Reglus Neves Freire termed “the banking system of education.”
Freire talks about a “culture of silence” in the schools and society at large. This is the result of systems of economic, social, and political domination, in addition to paternalism, to which marginalized peoples are the victims.
In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire writes,“The rightest sectarian (whom I have previously termed a ‘born sectarian’) wants to slow down the historical process, to ‘domesticate’ time and thus to domesticate men and women.”
Not surprisingly within this current authoritarian climate, legislators in Arizona a few years ago banned Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a pioneering and foundational work in the field of social justice education through liberatory consciousness.
A society that exists for the benefit of the corporate sector will fill students’ minds and deplete their labor before putting them out for collection to be recycled in another form and used up and recycled again in a self-perpetuating loop.
What effects have our neo-liberal age of standardization, corporatization, privatization, and deregulation of the educational, business, banking, and corporate sectors had on learning?
Standardized curriculum and testing were initially intended to gauge students’ progress, but have, unfortunately, metastasized into benchmarks for student advancement through the educational levels, for teacher accountability, as well as criteria for school funding from the government.
The Neoliberal age — education for the corporate sector — acts like a postal sorting machine to plug workers into businesses on a conveyor belt of conformity.
According to the so-called ““Allocation Theory” of education, schooling has turned into a status competition, which confers success on some and failure on others. Our schools have morphed into assembly-line factories transforming students into workers, and then sorting these workers into jobs necessary for industry and business.
In so doing, educational institutions legitimize and maintain the social order (read as the status quo). Schools drive individuals to fill certain roles or positions in society, which are not always based on the individuals’ talents or interests.
Education should be, as affirmed by Freire, a path toward permanent liberation in which people become aware (conscientização) of their multiple positionalities (identity intersectionality) and learn to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions. Through praxis (reflection and action), they can then transform the world.
To be truly effective, educators must spend many years in self-reflection and must have a clear understanding of their motivations, strengths, limitations, “triggers,” and fears. They must thoroughly come to terms with their positions in the world in terms of their social identities, both the ways in which they are privileged as well as how they have been the targets of systemic inequities.
They are not afraid of showing vulnerability and admitting when they are wrong or when they don’t know something. They have a firm grasp of their content area, and they work well with and are accessible to students and their peers.
Educators must be “culturally competent,” aware that students come from disparate backgrounds in terms of social identities and that students learn in a variety of ways. They must be informed on the historical and cultural backgrounds of diverse student populations, pedagogical frameworks, theories of cognitive development, personality types, preferred sensory modes of learning, and others.
In the ideal classroom, the overriding climate is one of safety. This is not, however, the same as “comfort,” for very often, comfortable situations might feel fine, but are not necessarily of pedagogic value.
“Safety,” in this case, refers to an environment where educators facilitate a learning process in which one can share openly without fear of retribution or blame, where one can travel to the outer limits of one’s “learning edges” in the knowledge that one will be supported and not left dangling.
Very often, a single semester course may not provide the educator sufficient time to fully appreciate the true growth or impact of their endeavors, but it can at least provide the opportunity to plant a seed. Overall, the role of the educator is to excite, motivate, develop or enhance in the student a continuing and life-long quest for learning.
In addition to teaching the 3 Rs (Reading, wRiting, and ‘Rithmetic), we need to teach students how to investigate issues around self awareness: how to “Read” the Self and “Solve” social, emotional, and ethical problems.
A goal of education for Freire is also to give students the tools to “read the world.”
But “education” and “schooling,” as currently constituted contradict their own methodologies by primarily focusing on grades in the service of eventual jobs and economic security for the educational consumer. In so doing, we have diminished in many of our students the joy of learning for learning sake and for the sake of understanding themselves and the world around them.
We are witnessing students around the country, individually and in coalitions, resisting and protesting the restraints imposed on their learning by legislative bodies and parents groups. The controversy itself has become a learning experience, a “teachable moment” that has brought students ever closer to conscientização.
Censorship and the imposition of patriarchal white Christian nationalism stand diametrically opposed to what our schools should practice.
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