Sometimes I come across things I perceive to be so ridiculous I can’t help but feel at once shocked and saddened. That happened to me last week when a friend of mine mentioned a textbook he was reading for one of his classes in school. He had originally been enrolled in a college in Tulsa, but this year he transferred to the University of Texas at Austin. One big difference about being at a Texas public school is the state-required curriculum; in Texas at least, all state schools are required to read a “Texas Politics” textbook.

To me, that certainly doesn’t sound like a horrible idea. If you’re going to be receiving an education in Texas (and, more importantly, if you’re planning on building a career in the state too), I think it’s highly rational for the state to want to teach you about its particular political systems and structures.

Of course, with state-mandated curricula like this, there’s always the problem of how exactly the state is going to implement this goal, and in this case I’m a little bit appalled.

One part of the text teaches about “what it means to be a Texan.” Here’s an excerpt from the book: “Being a Texan means alternately being independent, rugged, individualistic, simple, straightforward, doggedly determined, and proud; sometimes boastful and brash, materialistic and moralistic; religious; distrustful of government yet respectful of authority; believing in competition and survival of the fittest, yet concerned for those who might be down on their luck.”

Edifying, isn’t it? If you’re really interested, you can read more at http://texaspolitics.laits.utexas.edu/. When my friend posted this excerpt on Facebook, someone made the comment that you could swap out the word “Texan” for “lemming” and still communicate the same point. I suppose what I find salient here is that, if this book gets to decide what “being a Texan” really means, I can’t even consider myself a Texan in spite of having lived in Dallas my entire life. The same could probably be said for a majority of my friends.

Now, I don’t bring this point up to brag about the fact that I go to a private university where I don’t have to deal with mind-numbing state-sanctioned textbooks like this (though it certainly is nice). Really, I think what’s most interesting about this phenomenon is that it raises questions about the idea of “required reading.”

I’m not going to suggest that UT Austin and the rest of Texas’s public schools ought to stop teaching this textbook because I personally don’t like the message it’s teaching. There are a lot of ideas I don’t agree with, and removing them from a dialogue simply because I have hang-ups with them makes my Orwell sense tingle.

Moreover, SMU is no stranger to required reading itself. Every year incoming students are expected to read, discuss, and write about a text selected by a group of faculty. I’ve heard plenty of complaints that the required texts SMU has picked in the past few years underscore a “liberal bias” among the educational establishment here at SMU. And of course I disagree vehemently with that sentiment, but I also have to consider that I’m generally a more left-leaning person. I feel like it’d be hypocritical of me to support reading texts with viewpoints I agree with and decry studying those texts whose messages I personally find insulting.

After all, reading a text itself is not that dangerous of an activity. Just because Mark David Chapman might make the claim that “Catcher in the Rye” brainwashed him into shooting John Lennon doesn’t mean that books themselves have that much control over us. Reading a text requires more than just understanding a claim that’s being made; it’s about interpreting and evaluating that claim too.

If I were a professor at UT Austin, I might teach an entire class about why that specific portion of the textbook is wrong. And I might have some students who see my side of things, but I’d probably have just as many who don’t.

And after all, isn’t that the most beautiful part about college? We’re here to do more than have facts and data thrown at us.

An educational institution serves a purpose of not only teaching people skills, but also teaching people to think.

So if it takes a trite and maudlin excerpt from a mandatory textbook to elicit disagreement among students and actually start a dialogue, then I think that’s as good of a way as any to get the mental gears turning. As Indira Gandhi once said, “The power to question is the basis of all human progress.”

Brandon Bub is a sophomore majoring in English and edits The Daily Campus opinion column. He can be reached for comment at [email protected]