The intense national media
coverage of Texas' recent
rewrite of its Social Studies
course standards MISSED THEIR GREATEST SINGLE UPGRADE, which involved World History, not U.S. History. Texas' State Board of Education (SBOE) required high school World History books, not U.S. History texts, to most help students value general, overall benefits of free enterprise (see page 2 inside). High school World History will thus fulfill the Texas Education Code's legislative intent better than U.S. History, whose new standards stress free-market benefits much less emphatically. The SBOE should now add that while U.S. History texts must stop ignoring Christianity, high school World History books must cease attacking it. In World History the SBOE should take action in the interna­tional as well as the national culture war. It should check both militant Islamic cultural jihadists (backed by Arab petrowealth in the U.S. textbook industry), and American academic secularists, in their com­bined assault on Christianity in World History classes.

Texas' new pro-free enterprise high school World History standard revolutionizes that course's entire economics strand. It governs treatment of major events over centuries, is much more consequential than the mere insertion or shifting of individuals' names here and there in U.S. History standards that drew such media play. The stunned public silence that greeted this measure's passage signalled not its triviality but deep shock at its heretical audacity. Publishers' editorial boards and writing teams all know it voids pro-big government economic bias. Marxist misperceptions of the Industrial Revolution were the core of communism's pseudo-indictment
of capitalism and a staple of many World History books. Texas' reverberating revision compels them
to set straight the free market's positive record in world economic history, discrediting socialism by implication. An SBOE supporter of the new rule said
its chief SBOE foe strove doggedly, covertly, albeit in vain to the very last to overturn it.

Many wrongly think Texas'
SBOE can reject only those
textbooks that meet less than
50% of its course content standards, flunk certain manufacturing guidelines, or contain factual errors. But it can also dump those that clearly conflict with basic democratic values. For the first time ever the SBOE should invoke that power to warn publishers not to pander to Islam against Christianity – long a festering malaise (see the Manifesto within here) –
in their new high school World History submissions. Christian conservative mastery of detail in Texas' textbook approval process is power … as vital to identify textbooks that so prostitute themselves, as it is to abort their local adoption statewide. Texas' elected SBOE is the one viable national democratic proven check and balance on textbook publishers' otherwise seemingly-unslakeable lust to kowtow to Allah-lobby conceits. All the oil money in Arabia cannot actually sell into American schools a book rejected by Texas' elected SBOE in response to documentation by knowledgeable citizen-voters.

Like planets chafing in their fixed orbits, entities subject to Texas' textbook leadership fantasize escape. A California solon urged monitoring Social Studies books there against Texas' reforms. Unlike Texas, though, California state-approves no high school books, and local districts lack time to do thorough reviews. Plus, California has suspended textbook approvals until 2016 and may not resume them for "close to a generation," yielding to Texas. Further, Texas requires student text narratives and review exercises to reinforce its standards multiple times. Publishers claimed technology now permits them to customize texts for each state. Yet Texas vets books for conformity to its standards much
more carefully than other states do to theirs, just
as it finds in them many more factual errors than
they do. Texas' greater thoroughness and rigor in
its state textbook approval process make other states more likely to adopt Texas books unawares, sparing publishers the cost of truly variant versions.