This June, the Texas State Board of Education adoptednew social studies standards and a required literature reading list for its public schools. These changes follow Texas’s 2024 release of its “Bluebonnet” curriculum, a package of instructional resources for elementary school, which sparked controversy over the inclusion of Bible stories in the reading materials.
Bible stories, canonical books, and “patriotic” social studies standards have each invited familiar charges of culture-war excess. Perhaps. But look again—and look at these three things together.
Taken together, these initiatives suggest something more consequential than conservative provocation. Texas appears to be developing a coherent theory of education: Knowledge is cumulative, literacy depends on background knowledge, and language proficiency has an unavoidable cultural valence, meaning that it reflects the knowledge a speech community shares and assumes its members possess. Furthermore, Texas’s theory of education assumes that public education is obligated to equip every child with the knowledge, language, habits, and skills needed for full and effective participation in America’s civic, cultural, and economic life.
Texas may not have gotten every curricular choice right. But it appears to know what it thinks education is for. That alone distinguishes it from much of American schooling.
Start with the state’s new social studies standards. Their most striking feature is not their ideological orientation but their specificity and architecture. In the early grades, children learn stories, people, places, events, and traditions. Beginning in third grade, the standards become broadly chronological, moving from ancient civilizations through Greece and Rome, the medieval world, the Renaissance and Reformation, the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment, European colonization, the American Revolution, and the Constitution. The standards explicitly call for concepts to be embedded in stories and historical content in order to “create schema for understanding.”
This is a significant departure from the way American education often thinks about social studies—and education more broadly. For decades, schools have been encouraged to focus on skills: critical thinking, problem solving, analysis, collaboration, and, in literacy, comprehension strategies such as finding the main idea, making inferences, and identifying the author’s purpose. The tacit assumption is that the particular content used to practice these skills is negotiable and interchangeable.