Civics Op-Ed Revision

uncomfortably and work hard to ensure that students are being taught their obligations as a

citizen.

Comprehensive civics education is the idea that students should be taught how to

make change in the democratic system, and it must be taught in schools. This isn’t a new

concept, nor one that used to be controversial, in fact, it is the very basis for the idea of social,

studies. How do we show students that there are tactics to make change, and it doesn’t have to be

for the good of any party, but for the community? However, the lack of ability to differentiate

civics from politics in our hyper partisan environment has made it so this type of lesson is not

one that people want to see taught anymore. Being a democratic republic makes America a

member of what is still a very small club of nations, that give so much power to the people, but

as the saying goes, “with great power, comes great responsibility”. It is not enough to just be an

individual who goes and votes, with no knowledge of the people, positions, or system, we must

ensure that the goal is to have informed citizens.

Throughout the 87th legislative session (2021), there were almost two dozen civics-

related bills on the docket here in Texas, and I had the privilege to work with several

organizations to push for comprehensive civics education. Some of these bills restricted teacher’s

ability to do their jobs and talk accurately about history, others promoted action civics. Action

civics is the idea mentioned above about getting students involved in the process. Our goal was

to make it so that students here in Texas become more knowledgeable of our democratic system

and ideally are introduced to a curriculum that would allow them to get involved in their

communities, taking on projects where they interact with leaders to make a change. This was the

goal of HB 57 by Representative James Talarico, and there were several other bills that still

would have satisfied the goal. Instead, we got HB 3979, which restricted teacher’s autonomy in

the classroom and attempted to have the Legislature set up a “guidance list” of books/history that

could be taught in civics. This bill makes it, so the Teachers Association and State Education

Board no longer have complete control over the curriculum and has caused many to wonder

whether books not involved in the Legislature’s list are against banned.

This, as well as uncertainty from a section that stated that both sides of a political issue

have to be taught in schools led to the Southlake memo incident. This occurred when an

administrator suggested that if a teacher is going to teach about the Holocaust, they should also

provide an “alternative view”, there is no alternative view to the Holocaust. This is a major step

backward, and while the memo was retracted, it shows that the legislature’s attempt to have an

impact on civics was a complete failure that only led to more confusion/anger amongst

educators. The fact that the legislature used this bill to take such direct control over curriculum

places the blame and failure squarely on them. The question Texans and people all across the

country need to be asking themselves is why this law would be the one that gets passed and what

was the objective of the people who wrote it. The answer is critical race theory and January sixth.

The Virginia Governor’s election was decided in part due to the phrase critical race

theory (CRT), and the Governor-Elect promising to ban it on his first day in office. Newsflash: A

curriculum of critical race theory is not being taught anywhere in the country because it does not

exist. Britannica defines critical race theory as an “ intellectual and social movement and loosely

organized framework of legal analysis based on the premise that race is not a natural,

biologically grounded feature of physically distinct subgroups of human beings but a socially