The Texas textbook massacre

A cracking piece of reportage by my colleague Chris McGreal on the rewriting of school textbooks in Texas, including an interview with Cynthia Dunbar, one of the Christian evangelists and social conservatives who control the state's education board. "There seems to be a denial that this was a nation founded under God. We had to go back and make some corrections," says Dunbar. Those corrections include: The education board has dropped references to the slave trade in favour of calling it the more innocuous "Atlantic triangular trade", and recasts the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as driven by Islamic fundamentalism. ... One curriculum amendment describes the civil rights movement as creating "unrealistic expectations of equal outcomes" among minorities. Another seeks to place Martin Luther King and the violent Black Panther movement as opposite sides of the same coin.