Farewell, Thomas Jefferson.

Sayonara, Snoop Dogg, Wu-Tang Clan, and 50 Cent.

Adios, Cesar Chavez.

And a big welcome-back hug to Phyllis Schlafly, Newt Gingrich, and the ghosts of Stonewall Jackson and Joseph McCarthy.

If the Texas Board of Education gets its way – and it probably will – the complexion of history and social studies as they are taught in most U.S. schools is about to assume an even whiter shade of pale, while undergoing a sharp lunge to the Christian-fundamentalist right.

"I've just been muttering to myself all morning," said Megan Boler, a U.S.-born educator, now a professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE). "I can't believe it. I've never seen this extent of revisionist history."

Earlier this month, by a vote of 10 to 5, the body responsible for the contents of textbooks used in Texan primary and secondary schools gave preliminary approval to more than 100 controversial and ideologically driven amendments to state curriculum standards.

The vote followed three days of rancorous debate and proceeded along partisan lines, Republicans triumphing over outraged Democrats.

The public will now be granted a 30-day period to comment on the amendments, before a final vote takes place in May.

Given Republican dominance of the board, it seems likely the proposed changes will survive.

If they do, the amendments will overturn a broad array of long-standing tenets and beliefs about U.S. history and society, rejecting the constitutional separation of church and state, promoting a Judeo-Christian interpretation of the motivations that inspired the country's founding fathers, dropping references to Latino heroes and accomplishments, and justifying the red-baiting, anti-Communist extremism that overran large tracts of the U.S. body politic during the 1950s, spearheaded by Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Meanwhile, founding father Thomas Jefferson – unpopular with conservatives because he championed the division between religion and politics – is to be downplayed in classrooms. Conservative heroes such as Schlafly (known for her opposition to feminism) and Gingrich (leader of a Republican renaissance in U.S. politics) will now be promoted to U.S. students for their beliefs and accomplishments.

Jackson, a Confederate general in the American Civil War, is to be singled out as "a role model for effective leadership." But references to Latino heroes are to be played down, a move that would presumably affect the legacy of Cesar Chavez, the late Mexican-American civil rights activist whose birthday is now marked as an official or optional holiday in several U.S. states, including Texas.

Oh, yes – and the mainly black hip-hop musical style will no longer be considered "a significant cultural movement" among Texas youth. Country and Western will be celebrated instead.

The proposals have been lampooned on TV by liberal gadfly Stephen Colbert and others, but they seem to be going ahead just the same.

"This is very disturbing," said Roland Coloma, a professor of anti-racist and feminist studies, also at OISE.

"The narration of a nation's history is always contested, but this is very much an historical skewing of facts and events, and that's really unfortunate."

The proposed changes are formally restricted to teaching materials used in Texas, but the state's textbook-purchasing heft – second only to that of California – is so great that the historically revised tomes could well wind up being taught in 80 per cent of U.S. schools.

"The impact of this is huge," said Boler. "You will teach students to reject the constitutional separation of church and state."

During its deliberations, the Texas board consulted no historians, sociologists, or economists.

Instead, a seven-member conservative bloc – supported in the end by three more moderate Republicans – sought to "balance" what it regards as a long tradition of liberal bias in the presentation of U.S. history and culture.

That battle is merely an escalation – albeit a major one – in an ongoing struggle for ideological control of the state's classrooms. Conservatives on the Texas school board have long promoted the teaching of creationism, a branch of pseudo-science that advances a number of false or unlikely propositions – that humans have existed for only 6,000 years, for example, or that they were created in their present form by God, or that they once shared the earth with dinosaurs.

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Creationism's adherents reject evolutionary Darwinism, which ascribes the development of all species to the gradual mechanics of natural selection, with no need for an interfering deity. Evolutionary theory – now better known as evolutionary fact – is backed by the preponderance of expert scientific opinion, and this is a source of deep-seated frustration for creationists.

"I disagree with these experts," said Don McLeroy, a dentist, who heads the conservative bloc on the Texas board. "Somebody's got to stand up to experts that are just ... I think, I don't know why they're doing it. They're wonderful people."

So they are, but they seem to be on the losing side in Texas.

The same goes for Mary Helen Berlanga, a Democratic member of the Texas school board, who stormed out of the conference room this month in protest against the body's decision to remove favourable references to Hispanics from history and social studies texts – this in a state whose population is 36.5 per cent Latino.

"They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don't exist," she said. "They are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world."

Primary and secondary school teachers across the United States may soon be faced with a wrenching choice – either to robotically impart lessons whose content they reject, or else endanger their own jobs and the very existence of their schools.

Under a U.S. educational policy known as No Child Left Behind, public-school students must take a range of standardized tests whose outcome is used to measure the effectiveness of both teachers and schools. As a result, U.S. teachers who augment their lessons with supplementary material or stray from the core curriculum do so at their peril.

"It really puts teachers in a very difficult position," said Coloma. "Teachers in the United States feel the pressure of teaching to the textbook."

Neither he nor Boler believes a similar partisan takeover could upset Canada's schools, but this does not mean the Canadian system is without ideological taint.

"It's a matter of degree," said Boler. "I don't think we would ever see this kind of radical overhaul, but at the same time there are serious problems with the teaching of Canadian history. Canada prides itself on its multiculturalism, but the curriculum in Canadian schools doesn't adequately reflect that rhetorical claim."

She said Canadian schools pay "close to zero" attention to aboriginal history and also ignore black history and the contributions to Canadian society made by recent immigrant groups.

But these challenges or shortcomings do not compare to the rewriting of history now underway in Texas, she said.

"Already, the United States is known among wealthy nations for having the least robust education in history and social studies," she said. "Now it's not only thin. It's revisionist. Some of what is being proposed is fiction."

Welcome to the new millennium – and be careful what you read.