I'm not going to answer your question directly. I'm going to challenge you to answer it. You're 19 years old and a recent graduate of high school (public I hope). Think back over the past six years. What books were on your reading list? What books were your classmates reading? Why? In the school that two of my grandchildren are graduating from, the most popular book (I don't list names or authors - I think that parents need to read all the books on the list) on their reading list had more profanity in it than I heard in my twenty years as a sailor. When I asked the teacher (also a Christian) why it was there, his answer was, "I have to used the list provided by the school board". I also found that there were three books written by current politicians (all socially liberal). I'll leave it there. I'll be brief and give you one more objectionable book to me. Let me set the stage first. I am a scientist, and I believe that we have global climate change. The textbook for an earth science course, gave no dissenting science and much of the science it gave was questionable. That is indoctrination, not education.
The two examples are of things that happen when we let politicians write the standards and choose the materials.
My question stems directly from the fact that I haven't, to my knowledge, experienced what might constitute "politically motivated" and subsequently slanted, inaccurate, or otherwise incomplete curriculum (from the perspective of the textbooks or materials themselves, at least). The quality of my classes usually depended on the lesson plans set by the teacher along with the teacher's capacity to efficiently and quickly teach material, as well as the performance of the students. None of my textbooks were, to my judgment, inadequate. Nearly all of the literature I was exposed to in high school was more or less standard, time-tested material along the lines of the Brontë sisters, Shakespeare, Homer, and various anthologies containing relatively run-of-the-mill material. It's certainly true that a small portion of high school literature, especially in reference to AP material late in high school, is mildly to moderately explicit -- but it's certainly not selected on the basis of its explicit nature. It's important to recognize the distinction between literature that offers clearly compelling educational merit and literature with no such merit, as well as the fact that explicit material in a work is legitimately capable of more broadly or accurately defining or supporting the overall philosophy and context of the work in question. A wide array of variables have to be taken into consideration when defining and approving works of literature for schools, and the presence, merit, and ramifications of explicit material are simply one subset of dynamic, contextual variables to consider in this light.
As for science-based curriculum, I'd also have to profess that no material in my school's textbooks has ever listed what might legitimately constitute inaccurate, questionable or otherwise poorly represented science (or pseudoscience, depending on its application) along the lines of alternatives to evolution, misrepresentations or attempted refutations of anthropogenic climate change, or post-chapter questions with a clearly political bias, to my knowledge. Here's an example of what
would constitute a politically motivated question in a hypothetical textbook:
"The worldwide scientific consensus is conflicted in its view as to whether humans are contributing to recent climate change. What are some alternatives to anthropogenic climate change? Explain."
That's of course hypothetical, to reiterate, and it probably isn't mentioned or defined in some form or another in many, if any public school textbooks in the United States. It's questionable and inaccurate in that it misrepresents the prevailing, overwhelming scientific consensus concerning predominantly anthropogenic climate change and the general lack of well-substantiated alternatives -- thus, it's arguably "political" in that it can be construed to support a political or social agenda in spite of a clearly overwhelming scientific consensus to the contrary.
Overall, I really don't see any credible evidence to support the notion that politics is dictating school curriculum beyond politically motivated and arguably ineffective initiatives along the lines of No Child Left Behind, which by and large have nothing at all to do with the specifics of the curriculum itself. If you're attempting to imply that the lack of poorly substantiated alternatives to contemporary scientific theories supported by a broad scientific consensus that bill themselves as "science" in school textbooks is evidence of political indoctrination, or that a majority of high school literature is written and dictated by socially liberal politicians with correspondingly "liberal" agendas with an ulterior motive, I'm afraid I'll have to object. Again, there are legitimate, well-established reasons as to why the nation's academic performance is generally (but certainly not universally) inadequate, and "liberal political indoctrination" isn't one of them to any effectual degree.
