For years, the state of Texas has exercised an outsized influence on school textbooks—not without controversy, of course.
In 2010, the Texas Board of Education proposed changes in the state history standards to be reflected in textbooks. These changes came under close scrutiny at the time, with critics charging that the new standards would “water down” the principle of separation of church and state by “pointing out that the words were not in the Constitution and requiring that students compare and contrast the judicial language with the wording in the First Amendment.” But isn’t it reasonable for a textbook to point out that the Constitution does not contain the phrase “separation of church and state” (a common misperception among contemporary Americans) and encourage a close reading of the First Amendment?
Moses was another bone of contention because a proposed textbook presented him as a...
