Dallas Rep to State Ed Board Tells U.K. Paper, "There Is a Battle for the Soul of Education"

By Robert Wilonsky Mon., May 17 2010 at 11:00 AM

Categories: Edumication News, News

I'll recycle my old joke: Tonight, the role of Cynthia Dunbar will be played by Kristen Wiig.

Whenever we've needed to speak to someone rational on the State Board of Education, we've always called District 13's Mavis Knight, who reps parts of Dallas and Tarrant Counties. Very nice; very thoughtful. Also: very tactful -- like that time we talked to her about fellow SBOE board member Cynthia Dunbar's book that says public education is a "subtly deceptive tool of perversion." Knight said she found that sentiment, um, ya know ... enlightening. Let's leave it at that.

But Knight, wife of former Dallas City Manager Richard Knight Jr. and mother of Lancaster Mayor Marcus Knight, has clearly had it up to here with Dunbar and the other geniuses -- like Don McLeroy, who puts the "oy" in McLeroy -- rewriting American and Texas history down in Austin this very week. Yesterday, the U.K. Guardian profiled Dunbar, who's somehow allowed to tell my kid what to learn even though she home-schooled hers, lest they're thrown "in to the enemy's flames" known as public education. Says Dunbar, "There seems to be a denial that this was a nation founded under God. We had to go back and make some corrections." To which Knight responds:

"There is a battle for the soul of education. They're trying to indoctrinate with American exceptionalism, the Christian founding of this country, the free enterprise system. There are strands where the free enterprise system fits appropriately but they have stretched the concept of the free enterprise system back to medieval times. The president of the Texas historical association could not find any documentation to support the stretching of the free enterprise system to ancient times but it made no difference."

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