Textbook reshaping in NYT Magazine - How Christian Were the Founders? -by Russell Shorto

[Note: I was going to let this story pass and allow my comments to sit in my personal diary because they turn on matters of religious faith and because so much of the activism described here seems to me to arise from personal insecurity and need for affirmation from external sources, and these are always sore matters over which people can be very angry. And yet, I was deeply troubled by a lot of the very problematic approaches to American history and its teaching. I also think the strong influence of Texas, and its very clever law and rule making has made it an important market-maker in textbook publishing, in a way similar that some otherwise insignificant states have increase their influence through early primaries. So, with this caveat.... -Paul]

How Christian Were the Founders? - NYTimes.com

The past is a foreign country, and they don't always speak our language.

Russell Shorto in the NY Times Magazine talks about the influence of politics and religion on the development of school textbooks, notably because of the Texas State Board of Education. Texas has gradually supplanted California as the arbiter of what's included in textbooks nationwide, and many groups wanting to influence the young have been bringing their efforts to Texas. None of this is new to anyone who has watched this unfolding over the last two decades. The panicky tone is also typical. Shorto suggests that the fundamentalist Christians trying to influence the Texas State Board of Education are also looking to the idea of original intent in judicial rulings. (And also: "As Cynthia Dunbar, another Christian activist on the Texas board, put it, 'The philosophy of the classroom in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next.'"

Public education has always been a battleground between cultural forces; one reason that Texas’ school-board members find themselves at the very center of the battlefield is, not surprisingly, money.[....]  Texas uses some of that money to buy or distribute a staggering 48 million textbooks annually — which rather strongly inclines educational publishers to tailor their products to fit the standards dictated by the Lone Star State. California is the largest textbook market, but besides being bankrupt, it tends to be so specific about what kinds of information its students should learn that few other states follow its lead.

For me, this part was new, an evangelical Christian excavation of the pre-Revolutionary past to find documents opposed to the secularism (for lack of a better term) of the 18th century: