The right to study

 Arthur Mullen, in responding to questions from U.S. Supreme Court justices about what the 14^th Amendment covers, replied that he thought it includes “the right to study, and the right to use the human intellect as a man sees fit.”

The court agreed. In Meyer v. Nebraska, the court said the amendment specifically guarantees the right “to acquire useful knowledge.”

My problem with the Texas law about what can and can’t be taught in schools is that it would prohibit a student from learning about historical records.

Texas has myriad records that offend the current law. Let’s take one, a resolution introduced into the Texas House of Representatives in 1857, urging the state to urge the U.S. Congress to repeal the laws abolishing the international slave trade.

The resolution is detailed. It gives explicit arguments for white supremacy. It states why the majority of people in Texas believe that people of other races need to be enslaved. It quotes scripture.

It’s disgusting.

But it’s also a public document, a record of state government, and I think that the state has made it illegal to teach it in schools. I think if a history teacher presented the resolution in a class as somehow relevant to any current event, he or she could be accused of teaching critical race theory.

I don’t think a teacher could attempt to answer a student’s question about why this country has a problem with racism without getting into historical records like this one. Those documents are relevant — I’d say essential — in understanding how we got to this point. Those records are also matters of fact, not of opinion.

The new law presumes that our past has nothing to do with the problems we face today, which is obviously false. It’s the kind of logical failure that allows us to believe we can elect people of limited reasoning ability to public office without having to worry about the laws they’ll make.

History is about consequences. We’re not making good history today.

• Sources and notes: David Kopel, “Meyer v. Nebraska: As told by the lawyer who won it”; The Washington Post, Feb. 4, 2016. He quotes from Arthur Mullen’s autobiography, Western Democrat, published in 1940. For more, see yesterday’s note on the court case.