The sad part of this whole story is that the ringleader of our glorious textbook committee was voted out in the Republican primary. He's already a lame duck, but he'll be occupying that seat until a replacement is voted in November.

The Republican primary voters (who, as a group, are notably right of center) have rejected their own right-wing textbook historical revisionist!

Since I live in Texas, and my daughter is starting public kindergarden this fall, I'm very sensitive to this sort of thing. My expectation is that textbooks aren't all that influential any more in a world where kids can punch anything they want into Google and find their way to all sorts of resources. If my daughter could digest and understand the Wikipedia article on the separation of church and state, I'd be pretty happy.

If anything, I'm less concerned about historical revisionism in the social sciences and humanities and more concerned about the whole controversy over evolution. If my own education is a guide to what can happen, here's what worries me for the future. In 9th grade, I took "honors biology". So far as I can remember, we spent an awful lot of time memorizing the names of all the parts of things. We dissected a frog and had to give names to all the parts. There was the *briefest* discussion of evolution, but that's it. My conclusion, at the time, was that biology was stupid, and that's because it never explained anything. Just documented what was there.

Had I been taught that evolution is *the* thread that holds everything together, and you can explain everything in biology by how it may have evolved into its current shape and function, well that may well have changed everything for me.

That's really what concerns me about every aspect of curriculum revisionism. I'm less concerned that my daughter will be taught propaganda that's completely disconnected from the truth, but rather that her teachers will shy away from controversial topics that are essential to understanding how things work.