Including, but Not Limited to . . .

The fact that it took a gang of rightwing Kulturkampf commandos to kick Thomas Jefferson out of the State of Texas' history curricula makes me grin, seeing as how it was long the conservative position that liberal subversives were the ones trying to tear the great man down by endlessly harping on his slaveholding. The whole Texas educational brouhaha is really just further indication that the purpose of education is not to engage young minds, or whatever, but to inculcuate certain cultural biases and intellectual predispositions. Anyway, Matthew Yglesias' guest blogger, Dara Lind, doesn't seem to understand what the phrase "such as" means, i.e. that it's a synonym for e.g., which is by definition a partial list. In any case, it seems to me that the fact that the Black Panthers and Thoreau's civil disobedience make it into the curriculum at all is something worth praising, albeit while never forgetting that education is a fraud.

Her actual complaint is that while civic action by whites--the Boston Tea Party and Thoreau's tax dissent--are evidently painted in a positive light, the hoary, American-mythic tale of a deracinated and saintly Martin Luther King is going to be used to club out any notions about the importance of direct action in the Civil Rights struggle. Fair enough, except that I am yet young enough to remember my own high-school history, and this picture of King and the Civil Rights movement is not a departure from it. It is the normative, recieved, official history of that era. Rosa Parks was just tired, and all that. That doesn't make such bad history any less a target for mockery and derision, but the bad history itself is hardly novel. Meanwhile, if you can turn kids on to Thoreau's radicalism--and I, for one, think of Thoreau as one of our great native radicals--and then throw King at them, well, the dumb ones will draw no connections and not be harmed by it, but the smart ones will understand the lineage, and they may yet profit from an understanding that would otherwise be withheld from them.