Education: Cotton Curtain

The school board of Houston takes no interest in foreigners and their ways, and holds pretty much that the navel of the universe is in Texas, very likely in Houston itself. Like its postwar predecessors, it has doggedly opposed teaching little Houstonians anything about the United Nations. Last April it banned every textbook with even a hint of a one-world point of view, finally drove patient School Superintendent William Moreland into resigning (TIME, April 22). Last week it announced the latest phase of its crusade—a revision of the elementary-school social-studies curriculum that will keep Houston’s younger generation safe from learning anything at all about three-fourths of the globe. The curriculum:

¶ Third Grade: geography and history of Houston and the Gulf Coast area.

¶ Fourth Grade: history and geography of Texas, a new course that will replace one on world geography.

¶ Fifth Grade: United States history and geography.

¶ Sixth Grade: world geography, a course that deals only with the Americas.

¶ Low Seventh Grade: history and geography of Texas, replacing a course on the geography of Europe and Asia.

¶ High Seventh Grade: history and geography of Texas.

When the seven-man board voted, it studiously ignored the protests of its two most liberal members. “I hate to see us get so narrow,” complained Mrs. A. S. Vandervoort Jr. “We will just create a bunch of little Davy Crocketts and little Daughters of the Republic.” “It appears to me,” said former President W. W. Kemmerer of the University of Houston later, “that the board is encircling the state with a cotton curtain to prevent the children from peeping out.” Nonsense, retorted Acting Superintendent G. C. Scarborough, a member of the local White Citizens’ Council: “We’re just drifting back to the fundamentals.”