Americans everywhere should applaud the Texas Board of Education action to reconstitute a more historically accurate (read open and balanced) traditional stamp on school curriculum taught in the Lone Star state.

While that should be good news for all, unfortunately, for some, it is not because, as the second largest buyer of school textbooks, Texas has substantial influence on what content publishers include in study texts.

The Texas decision is bad news for naysayers who apparently prefer to perpetuate education curricula that for years has been hobbled by incomplete information. And, many add, since the early 1960s, compromised by skewed interpretation and presentation via indoctrination orthodoxy.

That reality got the attention of the Texas Board of Education. Two-thirds of its members demonstrated they get it; they voted to take remedial action.

The board strategy was not to cut liberal progressive favorites from the curriculum. Rather, they opted to expand the breath of curricula by including more fact-rooted information and perspective. That provides students with the opportunity to learn more by studying others previously excluded from curriculum controlled by entrenched educational bureaucrats.

As a result, new history and economics textbooks will add two champions of free-market economic theory: Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek. They will join — not supplant — the usual list of economists to be studied, like Adam Smith, communist Karl Marx and the liberal-labeled progressive John Maynard Keynes.

Another revision in economics texts: replace the word “capitalism” with the more accurate descriptor: “free-enterprise system.”

In addition, the Texas board approved scores of other amendments in order to improve accuracy and completeness in several other subjects, such as:

•To counter the idea, conveyed by limited coverage in current schoolbook texts that the internment of individuals of Japanese decent during World War II was motivated by racism, the Texas board directed that new textbook content be expanded to accurately point out that Germans and Italians were also interned in the United States during that war.

•They took note of the limited scope of information in school textbooks about the history of McCarthyism and directed that new textbooks include “how the later release of the Venona Project transcripts confirmed McCarthy suspicions of communist infiltration in U.S. Government.” Readers, and teachers who want thorough insight and understanding about the McCarthy era should read renowned journalist M. Stanton Evans’ investigative masterpiece “Blacklisted by History.”

•In sociology, the Texas board directed that teaching include “the importance of personal responsibility,” and that personal responsibility be included in a textbook section on life choices, behavior, dating, sexuality, drug use and even as a factor in eating disorders.

After the 10-5 vote, board of education member Mary Helen Berlanga accused fellow members of “rewriting history.” Colleague Mavis Knight added, “The social conservatives have perverted accurate history to fulfill their own agenda.”

Those two spin statements aside, again, Americans everywhere should applaud the action taken by the majority on the Texas School Board. Curriculum in Texas, and potentially in your state, will be strengthened.

If the Texas School Board did not adopt this concept, the real perversion would continue, skewing American history and shaping thought to fit an education mold. A mold that, while publicly stamped as progressive, is, in fact, regressive and, arguably, may have been designed to deceive and mislead young Americans.

Richard Olivastro is president of Olivastro Communications. He can be reached at Rich@Olivastro.NET or 877.RichSpeaks.