Thomas Frank regularly argues for the progressive worldview in his Wall Street Journal column — for the most part fecklessly, in my view. Recently he railed against the conservatives on the Texas State Board of Education for adopting curricular changes that challenge entrenched liberal orthodoxy in the nation’s textbooks. The Journal has now published three letters from perspicacious readers which refute Frank’s tirade.

In the first place, he glosses over the evidence and longstanding critiques of heavily biased textbooks, instead defaulting simplistically to the position that curricular decisions should be left solely to academic experts. Addressing this, one of his critics, a college professor, writes tartly:

My students arrive at college knowing only that they should recycle and that smoking is bad for you. Progressivism has destroyed the classical education that made the West great, and has replaced it instead with unthinking anticapitalism and the myth of the noble savage.
My students believe that capitalism protects the wealthy at the expense of the poor; they can’t explain why our capitalist society has produced the largest and wealthiest middle class in human history (of course, they’ve had no contact with human history). Nor can they explain why Marx, that champion of the poor, attacked not the aristocrats but the bourgeoisie, the middle class. They are surprised to learn, when they read the Communist Manifesto, that Marx mourned the loss of “the feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors.’ “
I understand that intellectuals like for all people to be bound to them as “natural superiors,” but academics long ago abdicated the throne when they embraced relativism, deconstruction and post-structuralism.

Another writer explains why Frank is wrong for projecting onto Alexander Hamilton his own liberal views. The third disputes his objection to the Texas Board’s insistence that the curriculum include the study of the negative “unintended consequences” that have flowed from welfare state policies of the 1960s.

These critics make considerably more sense than the blinkered Mr. Frank.