In a move that surprised absolutely no one who has spent more than five minutes in this state, the Texas State Board of Education just gave preliminary approval to a mandatory reading list for 2030. Because if there’s one thing Texas schools are famous for, it’s our love of “mandatory” things—unless it’s masks, vaccines, or paying teachers a living wage. The board voted 9-1 to move forward with a curriculum that supposedly fixes the previous version’s “lack of diversity” by… well, cutting out Frederick Douglass and Mary Shelley.
The original list was mocked for being an endless slog of “Great White Men” and Bible stories, so the board did what any good Texas committee does: they made it shorter but kept the Sunday School vibe. While Frankenstein and Douglass’s “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” were tossed into the literary woodchipper, the “Parable of the Prodigal Son” and the “Road to Damascus” remain firmly on the syllabus. Clearly, the board thinks our kids are more likely to encounter a divine revelation on the way to a Dairy Queen than they are to deal with the complex themes of social justice or, heaven forbid, science fiction.
Educators, who apparently still think their opinions matter, pointed out that the list is “mathematically impossible” to finish in a standard 36-week school year. But since when has the State Board of Education let something as trivial as “math” or “time-space reality” get in the way of a good ideological crusade? Teachers weren’t even allowed to review the list before it was sent to the board, because why consult the people who actually do the work when you can just let a bunch of politicians in Austin decide which stories are “Texan” enough?
Supporters claim this biblical deep-dive will help students understand the “influence of Christianity in U.S. history,” which is a fun way of saying they’ve given up on the separation of church and state and are moving straight to “Church IS the State.” Meanwhile, critics are calling it a “lawsuit waiting to happen.” Honestly, at this point, the Texas legal system is basically just a subscription service for educational litigation, so why stop now?
I guess if our kids can’t actually finish the “mathematically impossible” reading list by graduation, we can just hope they’ve memorized enough parables to explain to their future employers why they can’t read a manual.
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