What a Good Idea, Converting Libraries into Disciplinary Centers

Texan authorities always knew that quality education for the poorer classes was never a problem with teaching. It was discipline that was lacking. “Spare the rod and spoil the child” was a concept born in Texas, as long as it was not the children of billionaires and their super-rich tax avoiders. Those kids actually went to schools that had libraries, sports facilities, student orchestras, theater groups and swimming pools.

But Texas has a better idea

Interestingly, but not a total surprise, this year most students in the Houston Independent School District — the largest district in Texas — may be heading to schools with no libraries or librarians.

In August, the state announced plans to convert libraries into disciplinary centers, eliminating librarian positions at 28 elementary and middle schools. Another 57 schools are being assessed for the same outcome, with the goal of addressing low academic performance in certain schools. It’s no surprise that all the affected schools serve low-income Black and Hispanic neighborhoods. That’s 85 schools rich white kids don’t attend. Reaching for another applicable quote, does that smack of “reading and writing and ‘rithmetic, taught to the tune of the hickory stick?”

Hard for me to understand how closing the damned libraries will improve academic performance, but hey, this is Texas.

Another major gain in the making kids smarter campaign was to keep critical race theory off the curriculum. At least in Texas, we can’t have any of the remaining white kids feeling shame about their dads and grandads lynching their Black neighbors and then selling postcards of the event all the way up until 1992, when Congress finally made lynching a crime. After 102 years and 200 failed attempts, white southern Senators finally gave up blocking the law.

It's very popular these days to deny our genocide against native Americans, as well as all of the aspects of enslaving a huge proportion of the men and women the Declaration of Independence had guaranteed to be equal

You see, the State (former colony) of Virginia was where nearly all politics happened in those formative years after 1776. And Virginia was a slave state.

And here’s where things get fuzzy, depending upon your definition of ‘fuzzy’

On July 4, 1776, the Continental Congress adopted the historic Declaration text drafted by Thomas Jefferson. Modern interpreters claim that the enlightened group we call our “forefathers” did not intend it to mean individual equality. Rather, what they actually meant to declare was that American colonists, as a people, had the same rights to self-government as other nations. It bothers those modernists not a whit that there were no other self-governing nations at the time. America was plowing some formerly unplowed territory.

I’m not quite sure how Jefferson slid that one past his fellow Virginians, but various apologists of the modern persuasion claim he didn’t really mean what he wrote. From what I know of Jefferson, he was not careless with wording and, although he was a slaveowner at the time, I feel he was setting down a marker with those words because while he could not morally abide slavery, he had no chance of keeping Virginia in the war that was about to be fought, without the flim-flammery of allowing slavery to exist without naming it.

Thus Jefferson pulled off the impossible task of moving an immovable object. America paid a steep price for that, then, later and yet today.

So, here we stand, 247 years later, some, but not all of us trying to take ownership of our history

And it’s a contentious history, because much of it is ugly and racist. It’s hard to face that fact, but the Black and native Americans who are the survivors of those times know the truth. Texas doesn’t help by throttling our history to suit their diminishing white population, but then Texas has always considered itself a Lone Star State.

If there is a point to this pickiness of mine on the issue, it’s that American history is a shared history. Americans own it, warts and all, so we don’t get to only teach the part of it that makes us feel good. My grand uncle lost a hand in the Civil War while serving in the Illinois Militia and my mother used to wash his remaining hand for him before dinner. He wouldn’t talk about the war, except to say it didn’t solve much. And, like many of my forebears, he hit the nail precisely on the head. We Craven-Freemans are a plainspoken tribe.

Reconstruction of the South after the Civil War didn’t fail, it was overthrown

Lincoln was assassinated, the South lost and reconstruction had begun.

But it’s one thing to win a war and something entirely different to occupy a nation. And the conquered South was in many ways another nation, within a nation. Without a counter-effort from the North, white supremacists ruled the South by day—and, more importantly-- by night. The number of soldiers who died on both sides is generally estimated at 620,000, which equals the total combined American fatalities in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War.

That’s a lot of blood for a then population of 23 million.

The North was tired of conflict, the South reeling from a plantation economy without slaves and the possibility of race wars terrified southern citizens. For its part, the North essentially turned its back on a defeated South and put its mind to other things, its eyes looking away from night riders and lynchings. An unreconstructed South smoldered for a hundred years and smolders yet today.

That history is too complicated for this essay, but it’s cruel and dark and the fault of both North and South.

Texas’s unwillingness to teach critical race theory, as well as to ban books that could possibly make white children feel uncomfortable and closing libraries to blot out our history is unconscionable. Turning those libraries into detention centers brings memories of a Nazi Germany we had all but forgotten and merely serves to blow on the ashes of a still smoldering South.

But its good politics. Pulling education from under the legs of the unwanted is always good politics and bad social policy. Those dogs may not bark at the moment, but they are there, hungry and watchful.

What does the Electoral College and its shortcomings have to do with this conversation?

A good deal, actually, if you consider the circumstances of its origin.

Today, many pundits (too many perhaps) tend to downplay the extent to which race and slavery contributed to the Framers’ creation of the Electoral College, claiming it was created to give small states equal rights. Wrong. It was created to keep Virginia in the Union. Of the considerations that actually troubled the Framers’, race, slavery and holding the new country together were front and center.

The delegates to the Philadelphia convention of 1787 were in danger of the southern slave-states leaving the union. The Band-Aid they produced didn’t heal the wound, but put off civil war for sixty-nine years.

Direct democracy was mistrusted by the Framers, because they worried that the citizenry was too uneducated to make proper choices and might be swayed by demagogues or easily ruled by their passions. That’s why they gave us a republic, which votes for representatives of the citizens, presumably educated men, to carry out the serious work of government, ostensibly on the public’s behalf.

But electing a president by direct vote was a different matter

And the South was much concerned about losing their power to choose. The temporary compromise to assuage that fear was the Electoral College.

Keep in mind that the populations in the North and South were approximately equal, but one-third of those living in the South, some three million, were slaves. The forthcoming Electoral College agreement would leverage the three-fifths compromise, a bargain already made to determine how congressional seats would be apportioned. With about 93 percent of the country’s slaves in just five southern states, the deal made the South a major winner. Agreeing to count 3/5 of each slave for his master’s vote, the size of the South’s congressional delegation was increased by 42 percent.

For choosing a president, the three-fifths rule worked fine for the South

What is it they say? ‘Any port in a storm’ and holding a fragile new nation together against the world’s greatest power was a hurricane.

The Convention, terrorized by seeing their brand new republic coming apart so quickly and Virginia being part of the threat, the deal could not help but be made. After all, Virginia provided four of the first five American presidents of the United States, each of them slaveowners. Ultimately, Virginia seated eight presidents, more than any other state. But by modern standards the deal was racist to its core and continues to this day to give outsized power to southern states.

Texas converting its high-school libraries into disciplinary centers and refocusing American history through a lens that serves whites over minorities is simply the logical result of deeply racist decisions made under duress some 236 years ago.

“Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap,” so says Paul the Apostle in the Bible.

Things are not going so well in the reaping business these days, either socially, economically or politically, except at the very narrow top. It’s okay and a very American tradition to have political opinions, And if we trust our neighbors as we once did, we can have intelligent conversations about outcomes.

But it is not okay to be ignorant of our own country’s history.

Unless, of course, you go to public school in Texas.