Storytelling (was Critical Race Theory)

[Sanford Levinson]

Rick Duncan writes:

Paul Vitz has
>published a powerful study about censorship in public school
>textbooks, a study that concludes that there is bias indeed and "the
>nature of the bias is clear: Religion, traditional family values, and
>conservative political and economic positions have been reliably
>excluded from children's textbooks."

No doubt this is simply another example of the deep divide between Rick and
me, but I am flabbergasted that anyone could believe that "conservative . .
. economic positions have been reliably excluded from children's textbooks."
I would love to believe, for example, that the "government monopoly" tells
students of the rise of trade unions as a necessary corrective to rapacious
capitalism, etc., etc., and that the "deunionizing of America" explains, as
much as anything, why it is that approximately 40 million of our fellow
citizens are without medical insurance, etc., etc.  The State Board of
Education here in Texas makes one of its requirements for textbooks that
they convey sufficient praise of our "free-market system" (which, I strongly
suspect, includes no discussion of Houston's dependence on boondoggles like
the space station, which, as I recall, Phil Gramm and House Majority Leader
(for now) Richard Armey support with vigor), financed, of course, by the
taxpayers, etc., etc).  Perhaps it's true that fairly few textbooks
celebrate full-scale laissez-faire.  Is that what Rick means by
"conservative economic positions"?  Ironically enough, it was traditional
conservatives like Southey in England and George Fitzhugh in the US who were
most savagely critical of the emerging reality of "wage slavery."  And, by
the way, are the Catholic Bishops "conservative" or "liberal," in any
"essential sense?  Isn't their critique of cowboy capitalism a product of
the same impulses that lead them to criticize abortion and assisted suicide?
I have publicly praised the brief written by the ostensibly conservative
Michael McConnell in the assisted suicide cases, submitted in behalf of
Orrin Hatch and Henry Hyde, for focusing on the vulnerability of those most
likely to be encouraged to take advantage of suicidal options, and I pointed
out that these arguments--very much reminiscent of the progressive critique
of the focus on abstracted rights stripped from their actual social
context--are far more congruent with how liberals like to imagine their own
central values than with the libertarianism that unites both the Cato
Institute and, in this issue at least, the eminent philosophers who endorsed
a constitutional right to such assistance.  (As it happens, I would support,
as a legislative matter, assisted suicide, but I have no trouble with the
Court's deciding that it is not really something suitable for their
"definitive" resolution.)

Sandy Levinson

Sandy Levinson