What About Freud? Marx?

[Jeffrey St. Clair]

Why all of the media uproar over the decision of Kansas to elide (as much as
possible) the observations of Mister Darwn from the classroom? Having spent many
hours in the middle and high school classrooms of Oregon, that Enlightened State,
tracking the studies of my two teenagers, Darwin has yet to make even the
slightest appearance. The biology classes scrupulously avoid the meta-topic of
evolution. Kansas has made de jure, what is de facto across much of the nation.

But so what? Other great post-enlightenment thinkers, Freud, Hegel, Marx, Weber,
and Levi-Strauss, have also been carved from any textbook and are not even to be
found in the high school library--this is in the Portland metro area, not faraway
Baker City. (Not to mention, closer to home, Edward Abbey or Vine Deloria, who
have more to say about the real history of the West than anything in the history
texts.)

Can you imagine  CNN (or the NYT, for that matter) devoting stories to, say, the
State of Alabama's decision to excise Marx from the high school curriculum? Nope.
But I can easily envision widespread outrage on those same editorial pages at a
decision by, say, the Ann Arbor school district to make the 18th Brumaire and
Totem and Taboo required reading.

--jsc