Being ignorant is nothing to be ashamed of, but it is nothing to be particularly proud of either. A large and disruptive segment of the Texas State Board of Education is not only ignorant — a state that we all share at various times and on various subjects — it is proudly and aggressively ignorant, which goes beyond simple ignorance and ventures into the territory of malignant stupidity.

For the last several years, the forces of ignorance have made a run at the State Board of Education, and have met with some success. Religionists and reactionaries have won enough seats on the board to make their presence felt when it goes about the important job of setting standards for public school textbooks. They are intent on denying science and history and substituting their own religious or political ideologies over the research and judgment of legitimate scientists and scholars.

Any book that doesn’t measure up to the board’s idea of religious or political correctness is likely to be banned from Texas public-school curricula, and because Texas buys so many school books, publishers who share this know-nothing view reap a profitable windfall.

Worse, other publishers, publishers that should know better, feel pressured to modify their textbooks to fit Texas’ backward view of the world, which means that students in other states also fall victim to the Texas board’s ignorance.

The board has been mulling over its standards for social studies, and the results have not been pretty. There was a vigorous debate on whether to allow hip-hop music to be included in a social studies discussion on popular culture. Board member Don McLeroy of College Station wanted to ban hip-hop and insert country and western.

There have been motions to ensure that Phyllis Schlafly is enshrined in America’s pantheon of heroes and that Ralph Nader is banished.

You can leave ’em both out for our money, but we’re no historian, which is, of course, the point: These boobs on the State Board of Education aren’t historians, either. They aren’t even educators. For the most part, they are bottom-feeding politicians who have adopted the popular demagoguery of the day and have ridden it to membership on a little-known but very important state board.

Such foolish posturing was bound to trip over its own shoelaces at some point, and it did. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported this week that the board had banned the books of children’s author Bill Martin from third-grade reading lists because of left-wing tendencies.

Martin, who died in 2004, is the author of such seditious books as Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? and other radical calls for revolution featuring bears and other forest creatures. Board member Pat Hardy of Weatherford had formally moved to ban Martin’s work, saying that while he had never read it, he was acting on the recommendation of another board member, Terry Leo of Spring. Leo had told him that Martin was the author of a book titled Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation.

Well, it turned out that Ethical Marxism was published in 2008, some four years after Bill Martin died. It was written by another Bill Martin, a philosophy professor at DePaul University in Chicago. That Bill Martin, as far as is known, has never written anything for third-graders.

Terry Leo, for her part, said she had never read Ethical Marxism, but the title was enough to set off her built-in alarm system.

That is the way these people work. Don’t research authors; just look at a list of names. Don’t read books; ban them based on the title.

These people are in charge of choosing our children’s textbooks. Our children are in deep trouble.