Pity the poor Texas public school student

It's bad enough that Gov. Hair exempted Texas from the national education goals designed to make sure that American public school students can compete with those from other countries and make them better prepared for life outside the classrooms. What makes it worse for Texas public school students is that their basic curriculum is not being decided by educational value, but by politics and ideology.

The Texas Board of Education, a panel of politicians that obviously knows nothing about education, is making decisions that should best be left to teachers and scholars. Wait a minute! Teachers and scholars did work for almost a year to produce new curriculum standards, but the political board has totally disregarded that curriculum to insert a political one of its own.

I don't mind that the board decided the word "capitalism" should be taboo and replaced with "free-enterprise system." That simply makes Texas look foolish, not stupid. But questioning the doctrine of "separation of church and state" from the social studies curriculum is flatly wrong-headed, as is eliminating Thomas Jefferson from the list of revolutionary writers because he coined that phrase.

Texas school children deserve better than this. They are being placed at a disadvantage they'll probably never be able to recover from. It's absolutely criminal that these politicians are punishing Texas school children to serve their own political agendas.