The Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) has finally delivered a major blow to the secular monopoly of public education. On Friday, the Republican-led board voted 9-4 along party lines to approve a revamped K-12 literature and social studies curriculum that places the Bible back where it belongs: at the bedrock of Western literacy.
The new English Language Arts (ELA) and literature curriculum will mandate that public school students read foundational biblical texts, including the account of Adam and Eve, the Beatitudes, and the Parable of the Prodigal Son.
Predictably, the professional left and establishment squishes are having an absolute meltdown.
The Battle For Classical Literacy
For decades, public schools have systematically starved children of the cultural and historical literacy required to understand Western civilization. It is highly possible to graduate high school without having read Shakespeare, The Iliad, or Washington’s Farewell Address.
The newly approved standards will become fully operational by the 2030-31 school year, ensuring that Texas students will actually understand the biblical foundations of the laws, literature, and history they are being taught.
Furthermore, the board paired these biblical readings with a major overhaul of the K-8 social studies standards, which successfully gutted several left-wing, race-obsessed metrics. The new standards eliminated a sociology requirement to “analyze the varying treatment patterns of minority groups,” replacing racial grievances with actual historical context.
One cringier setback is that they also introduced the biblical story of Moses alongside Harriet Tubman to highlight how her faith-driven efforts earned her the nickname “Moses,” a natural, historical connection that secularists have tried to sanitize for years.
The “Judeo-Christian” Fig Leaf Exposed
Of course, the corporate media and progressive religious groups immediately scrambled to find any angle to discredit the decision.
A coalition of reform rabbis and liberal Jewish activists emerged to complain that the SBOE’s curriculum is “heavy on Christianity” and dismissed their specific, modernized preferences. Activists like Houston Rabbi David Segal and Blake Ziegler of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism testified against the SBOE’s inclusion of Lamentations Chapter 3.
Their grievance? The curriculum uses a classic 1917 translation rather than a modern progressive rendering, and Ziegler fretted that the passage’s graphic descriptions of God’s wrath were “not appropriate for eighth grade.”
Segal went even further, attacking the board for placing Lamentations, detailing the temple’s destruction as a consequence of Israel’s sin, alongside Holocaust literature, suggesting this would somehow “invite antisemitism.”
This is standard-fare therapeutic deconstruction. In their rush to sanitize Scripture of any mention of sin and divine judgment, these progressive leaders are effectively demanding that public schools teach a neutered, toothless version of history. Joshua Fixler, another rabbi from Houston, admitted to the Texas Tribune that he views the term “Judeo-Christian” as merely a “fig leaf” for Protestant Christianity.
Actually, he’s partially right but for the wrong reasons. The term “Judeo-Christian” has long been a soft, ecumenical compromise used by establishment conservatives to avoid saying what they really mean. America was not founded on a vague, pluralistic vibe. It was founded on a robust, Protestant Christian worldview.
Left-Wing Outrage and Public School Opt-Outs
The usual secularist pressure groups did not disappoint in their theatrical condemnations. Rachel Laser, the CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, released a standard-issue boilerplate statement claiming Texas is trying to “indoctrinate a new generation of Americans in the lie that America is a Christian country.”
Under the new rules, parents who object to their children learning the Bible of Western civilization will have the ability to opt them out of the lessons. However, state education officials have already made it clear that those students can still be tested on the material.
Conclusion
The SBOE’s 9-4 vote is a massive victory for both Christians and classical education and a direct punch to the gut of the secular education establishment. By restoring Adam and Eve, the Beatitudes, and Moses to the classroom, Texas is proving that “You can just do things” to reclaim territory from the cultural Marxists.
The whining of reform rabbis and progressive activists is proof enough that the SBOE is finally over Target. Secularists have had their run of the public school system, and the decline in basic literacy is their legacy. It’s about time Texas started rebuilding the foundations.
