Texas public school textbooks are more than likely full of factual errors.

OK, I am acutely aware that teachers and parents all across the state are aware of it. But what’s interesting to me, and why I’m commenting on it today, was the speed with which I detected two errors in an Amarillo Independent School District high school textbook. I found them within minutes during a casual browse through a particular book.

I was pulling a shift today as a substitute teacher and had a break from classroom work, as students had gone to a pep rally at Caprock High School. The text, published by a British publishing company, chronicled some of the most influential speeches in world history.

Two errors jumped out at me.

One speech noted in the textbook was the last entry, remarks delivered on Sept. 11, 2001 by President George W. Bush to a nation reeling from the shock of the terrorist attacks earlier that day. The background information contained a reference to Bush being “nominated” for president by the Republican Party in June 1999. Wrong date and month. The GOP convention nominated the Texas governor in August 2000. Bush did announce his candidacy for president in June 1999, which I guess the British publisher thought was tantamount to nomination. Someone needed to do their homework on that one.

The second error was a bit more nuanced, but only slightly so. And it’s also more egregious.

Another historical figure highlighted was Vaclav Havel, the former president of Czechoslovakia. Havel was a playwright and dissident before being elected president in February 1993, after the fall of the communists who had ruled the country since the end of World War II. But the textbook made an erroneous reference to when the Soviet Union took control of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Wrong. The summer of 1968 marked a bloody uprising by dissidents in that country against the communist hardline leaders and the Soviet Union sent tanks and troops into the country to quell the rebellion, just as it had done a dozen years earlier in Hungary.

I mention these two errors only to illustrate the ease with which little ol’ me found these mistakes and to wonder aloud how many other textbooks fill public school libraries all across Amarillo – and Texas – with such mistakes. This is part of what we’re using to educate our children.

Can’t we do better?