The following is a means of viewing what progress our enemies have made to date
in their attempts to alter or remove historical events from our textbooks, and to see
how well they are aided by our own negligence and ignorance of what is happening.

Placed on this website on May 21, 2008, because it is a pivotal issue for freedom.

Back to Critical Thinking

Back to California Threatened by Communism

Main Menu

 

TEXTBOOKS FLUNK TEST

by George Archibald

From The Washington Times, www.washingtontimes.com


 

Social studies textbooks used in elementary and secondary schools [in the U.S.] are mostly a disgrace that, in the name of political correctness and multiculturalism, fail to give students an honest account of American history, say academic historians and educational advocates.

"Secondary and college students, and indeed most of the rest of us, have only a feeble grasp of politics and a vague awareness of history, especially the political history of the United States and the world," says Paul Gagnon, emeritus professor of history at the University of Massachusetts.

Most textbooks produced by a handful of giant commercial publishers, are exposing generations of children to cultural and history amnesia that threatens the very basis of American free institutions and liberties, warn leading historians who are calling for better-defined, more rigorous state teaching standards.

Just 11 percent of eighth-graders show proficient knowledge of U.S. history on standardized tests - down from 17 percent in 2001, Mr. Gagnon noted in a recent study for the American Federation of Teachers.

"Less than half knew the Supreme Court could decide a law's constitutionality," he said in the Albert Shanker Institute study titled Educating Democracy: State Standards to Ensure a Civic Core.

"Only a third knew what the Progressive Era was and most were not sure whom we fought in World War II."

Publishers acknowledge having buckled since the early 1980s to so-called multicultural "bias guidelines" demanded by interest groups and elected state boards of education that require censorship of textbook content to accommodate feminist, homosexual, and racial demands.

The California State Board of Education was the first to adopt such guidelines in 1982, according to New York University education research professor Diane Ravitch in her latest book, The Language Police.

The California guidelines instruct textbook publishers and teachers: "Do not cast adverse reflection on any gender, race, ethnicity, religion, or cultural group."   The board had informal "social-content standards" going back to the 1970s.

Publishers followed with their own editorial anti-bias guidelines, which banned words, phrases, images, and depictions of people deemed unacceptable - such as man, mankind, manpower, men, said to be sexist.   Also banned are able-bodied, aged, babe, backward, chick, fairy, geezer, idiots, imbecile, Redskin, sissy, suffragette, and waitress.

Who's responsible?

A handful of commercial publishers produce most elementary and secondary school textbooks used in the United States, which cost the nation's taxpayers about $250 million per subject.

They are Glencoe, a subsidiary of McGraw-Hill; Holt, Rinehart & Winston, owned by Harcourt, Inc., U.S. division of the Dutch publishing conglomerate Reed Elsevier Group; McDougal Littell, owned by Houghton Mifflin; and Prentice Hall, a subsidiary of British-owned Pearson Education Inc., which also owns Scott Foresman, Addison Wesley, Silver Burdett, Ginn, and other school-textbook imprints.

All companies have developed their own internal checklists that dictate writing, graphics, photos, and other textbook content.

A team of 16 academic reviewers in Texas, the second largest state market for textbooks behind California, last year found 553 factual and interpretive errors in 28 social studies texts submitted for adoption by the state board of education.

The books were for sixth-grade world culture, seventh-grade Texas state history, eighth-grade and high school American history, U.S. government and economics, and high school world history.

"For 351 of the 533 errors identified, publishers agreed to either revise statements to correct factual inaccuracies or to add clarifying statements to rectify ambiguity," said Chris Patterson, research director for the Texas Public Policy Foundation in Austin, which commissioned the review.

For 35 percent of noted errors, "publishers denied that the information was incorrect and stated that the reviewers misunderstood the textbook," Mrs. Patterson said, "However, in these cases, publishers did not modify the text to ensure students would not fall victim to the same misunderstanding suffered by scholars and teachers who reviewed the texts."

She said many textbook errors cited by the foundation involved "clear bias" - opinions presented as fact, content "not sufficiently objective", or distortion through lack of substantive facts.

Sixth-grade texts on world cultures were strongly criticized by reviewer Steve Gorman, teaching professor of humanities and political science at Southwest Texas State University at San Marcos.

He said McDougal Littell's World Cultures and Geography was marred by "weak treatment of American history," while World Explorer: People, Places and Culture by Prentice Hall "handled American history better but dropped the ball on European history."

Harcourt's Harcourt Horizons and Holt's Holt People, Places and Change: An Introduction to World Studies largely bungle the history throughout, not only by giving it minimal attention, but also compounding neglect with many errors of fact and interpretation," Mr. Gorman said.

"Almost all the books have deficient treatments of religion in general or of particular religious traditions, with the Christian tradition being almost uniformly the least well developed in all the books.

"There is in all the texts a general tendency to see religion as just one trait among many cultural traits, rather than as a primary foundation of culture," Mr. Gorman said, "In my own study of history and in my own personal experience, I have encountered many who are willing to give up their lives to keep or defend their religious faith, but rarely anyone who is willing to die for the right to eat pizza of dance the rumba."

Economy of scale

Stephen D. Driesler, executive director of the Association of American Publisher's school division, told The Washington Times that textbook publishers "find themselves damned if they do or damned if they don't follow the guidelines set forth" by state and local school boards and national organizations insisting on censorship of particular terminology or ideas in school materials.

"California is our largest state, and as such, it is also the single largest purchaser of textbooks.   The economic reality for an educational publisher is, if they want to sell textbooks in California, they have to follow these guidelines," he said.

Mrs. Ravitch, author of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute's recent Consumer's Guide to High School History Textbooks, blames statewide textbook adoption laws for committee-written books that students find boring and barely tolerable.

"There's an incredible sameness about them.   They're following the same script," she told reporters in a briefing on the study of a dozen American and world history texts issued Feb.26.

In a 1,000-page textbook weighing almost eight pounds, "There's so much included," Mrs. Ravsitch said, "They're incoherent because of the pressure to include everything.   They're colorful but they have irrelevant graphics."

At at time when the Harry Potter series grabbed children's imagination and loyalty because the books are "exciting and well written... resonate with suspense, mystery, intrigue, and showdowns between the forces of good and evil," school history textbooks had achieved the heights of banality," thanks to political correctness, she wrote in an essay last fall for the Hoover Digest.

"They aim not to engage students, imagination, but bolster their self-esteem... Harry Potter has triumphed because his author understands the power of story.   If the story is good enough, children will take a flashlight to bed so they can keep reading after the lights are out.   Unlike textbook publishers, who must screen everything before they print to avoid giving offense."

"Deadly dull"

Historian David McCullough, who won two Pulitzer Prizes for his biographies of Presidents John Adams and Harry Truman, also calls school history and school social studies textbooks "deadly dull."

"It is as if they were designed to kill anyone's interest in history," he said in an interview, "A child made to read those books would ask, 'What did I do wrong today that I am being so punished?'"

Further evidence of "something that's eating away the national memory," Mr. McCullough says, is a survey last year of seniors at 50 top colleges and universities by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

"It's astonishing.   More than half didn't know George Washington was the commanding general of the Continental Army during the American Revolution who accepted Brig. Gen. Cornwallis' surrender at Yorktown.

"Thirty-six percent thought it was Ulysses S. Grant," commanding general of the Union Army during the U.S. Civil War.   "Six percent said it was Douglas MacArthur," U.S. commander during the Korean War.   "Thirty-two percent said Washington.   It was a multiple-choice question.   They were winging it.

"If you don't know what Yorktown was all about, and that Washington was the commander, you don't know... a lot about American history that you ought to know," Mr. McCullough said.

Wilfred M. McClay, humanities professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, said that when graduates of Harvard and other great unversities "are not learning the basics of American history, it is safe to assume that almost no one is, and that there will be almost no one to pass such knowledge on to the next generation...

"Historical memory is as much a necessity to the preservation of liberty and American security as is our own armed forces," he said.

Mrs. Ravitch said states should get rid of statewide textbook-adoption laws and let teachers have freedom to select their own history books and original source materials to teach history.

"This power is too easily compromised by pressure groups and by bureaucratic demands," she concluded in the Fordham study, "The states should set their academic standards, align their tests to those standards, and leave teachers free to select the books, anthologies, histories, biographies, software, and other materials that will help students meet the standards."

Mel Gabler of Longview, Texas, a textbook reviewer for 40 years, said he "absolutely disagrees completely" that local textbook selection is better than statewide selection, because publishers, teachers unions, and other organized interests would block out parental interests.

"They'll offer the best of the two that create less controversy at the state level," said Mr. Gabler, who with his wife, Norma, founded Education Research Analysts in 1961 to review textbooks from a Christian conservative perspective.

"Publishers are advantaged by local adoption because they have more personnel" to overwhelm possible criticism.   At the state level, where organized parents and pro-family groups marshaled objections against textbook content - that's kicked out many a book," Mr. Gabler said.

Better yet, Mr. McCullough said, teachers should abandon textbooks altogether and use other books and resources instead to teach history and geography.

Textbooks written to be "politically correct" do not tell the truth about the struggle and conflict through the ages to avoid offending minorities, ethnic groups, women, and other advocates, he said

"History is a story, cause and effect.   And if you're going to teach just segments of history, women's issues, these youngsters have almost no sense of cause and effect," he said.

Mr. McCullough said, "I would do away with the textbooks... Get rid of all the state commissions that write the textbooks" because they fail to instill in students a sense of gratitude for the country's leaders over the centuries and what the American people endured and accomplished in order to pass on a legacy of freedom and prosperity.

"I think that to be ignorant or indifferent to history isn't just to be uneducated or stupid.   It's to be rude, ungrateful.   And ingratitude is an ugly failing in human beings."

Whither textbooks?

In the post-September 11 world, the most important task of elementary and secondary social studies teachers is to make sure that students know and appreciate the foundations of individual liberty and national security in a free society, said Gloria Sesso, a K-12 social studies administrator in New York's Patchoge-Medford school district, and John Pyne, social studies supervisor in New Jersey's West Milford school district.

"It is vital that today's students are in touch with and able to affirm the values that define us as a nation - the values that the September 11 terrorists and their controllers scorned and attacked, and the values from which tyrants shield their people," the educators write in a Fordham Foundation report.

In this context, the many educators and school administrators are coming to believe that huge survey textbooks that cover centuries of history and world culture may be outmoded and too expensive in an era of state learning standards designed to increase student academic achievement and knowledge.

With a plethora of books, films, original and supplementary materials available from libraries and on the internet, textbooks now often are used as a supplement with other materials, said Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools in Washington.

"It's almost like drinking from a fire hydrant," Mr. Casserly said of the wealth of materials available to teachers and students in addition to social studies textbooks.   "The challenge is getting schools aware of all the resources, and making sure that all the resources link together in a coherent way."

E.D. Hirsch Jr., English professor emeritus at the University of Virginia and author of the widely-acclaimed Core Knowledge Series said in the study that students must be taught "moral progress in history" and firmly understand that "America's religiously motivated enemies do not accept a founding premise of the First Amendment - that every culture or religion is deserving of respect."

Mr. Hirsch said: "Our very tolerant way of regarding other people's traditions and beliefs contrasts sharply with the intolerant way our adversaries view American traditions and beliefs.   This contrast can create a problem for us and our children if our traditions of tolerance are allowed to lapse into facile relativism, under the bland illusion that everybody now operates under the benign post-Jefferson notion of tolerance, which is our inheritance from the European Enlightenment.

"It's therefore important to teach our children the big, crucial restriction that the Enlightenment and our founders placed on the idea of religious and cultural toleration.   Every culture or religion they said, deserves to be left in peace and freedom so long as it leaves every other culture or religion in peace and freedom."
 

From David Horowitz' News from the Front - The Terrorism Awareness Project

This summary of the article shows both how rooted Islamo Fascism is in America and that there is hope that it will be eradicated soon.   For more information, go to www.horowitzfreedomcenter.org and What Really Happened in the Middle East.

The Freedom Center has been at the front of the defense of conservatism in American colleges and universities.   The worst educational institutions at this time are UC Berkeley and Columbia University, but there are many others who have been staffed by Socialist Fascists and Islamo Fascists.   Consequently, the Freedom Center is sponsoring a Terrorist Awareness Project (TAP).

Various Muslim organizations fund anti-American propaganda and campaigns.   Those listed as being the most successful are the Muslim Students Association (MSA), the Islamic Society of North America, the North American Islamic Trust, the Islamic Circle of North America, the International Institute for Islamic Thought, and the Islamic Association for Palestine - from which came the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) three years later.   The Islamo Fascism Awareness Week (part of TAP) is being strongly opposed by the MSA and like organizations which will be championed by Sheikh Khalid Yasin who has said (1) that the U. S. was behind the 9/11 attack, (2) that homosexuals should be put to death, (3) that AIDS was invented in U.S. government laboratories, and (4) that Jews are "filth" deserving of death.

TAP produces materials on terrorism for distribution on campus and for the general populace - major pamphlets about the origin and intentions of radical Islam, over 250,000 copies of which are scheduled to be distributed to university students by the end of 2008. The titles are:
(1) What Every American Needs to Know About Jihad,
(2) An Islamic Mein Kampf,
(3) The Nazi Roots of Palestinian Nationalism and Islamic Jihad,
(4) The Oppression of Women in Islam,
(5) Jimmy Carter's War Against the Jews,
(6) Plan for Genocide,
(7) The Muslim Students Association and the Jihad Network,
(8) Palestine: America's Enemy,
(9) Muslim Persecution of Christians, and
(10) The Next Mideast War.

Six flash videos have also been created, each about six minutes in length.   They were sent to the electronic mailboxes of over two and half million students, faculty, and the general public.


One of the primary goals of the Communists is undereducation of a target nation's children.   The following paragraphs from National Review are examples of the progress of the Communists (liberals, progressives, socialists, whatever they call themselves today).   Another example - not shown here - is the movement by some to make pi, the key in math to circular measurement, equal to 3 (no use of any numbers on the right of the decimal).   This, of course, would affect our future engineers and mathematicians to the detriment of our society - not to mention those who actually build things.   And it would make us incompetent in the eyes of the world - unless the slavemasters (the Communists) are successful in implementing such measures everywhere.   Bear in mind that Communists have always eliminated those who are educated and able to think clearly because such people are more difficult to bamboozle.


From National Review February 23, 2009

Linguistic conservatives should arm for battle.   The humble apostrophe is under threat in various parts of the Anglosphere.   One English municipality had dropped it from street signs for places like St. Paul's Square.   Australian grammarian Kate Burridge (author of Weeda in the Garden of Words) wants the possessive apostrophe scrapped altogether.   A professor at University College, London, is arguing that strict rules of spelling and grammar "hold children back," and he wants the apostrophe completely eliminated.   Defenders of the little critter have counterattacked with examples of sentences ambiguous in an apostrophe-free world: "Those smelly things are my brothers," for example.   American conservatives should join the fray in defense of traditional usage.   Of course, we shall need to enlist some good conservative and academic names in the cause: our own Kate O'Beirne, perhaps; Dinah D'Souza; novelist-professor John L'Heureux; Nobel physicist Gerardus 't Hooft...   In any case, there is nothing difficult or mysterious about correct placement of the apostrophe.   The rules can be learned in ten minutes.   This campaign will need all the support it can get.   It certainly has our's!


From National Review December 7, 2009

The City University of New York was a great conduit for upward mobility through the early and middle decades of the 20th century, with a glittering list of alumni in law (Felix Frankfurter), science (Jonas Salk), the military (Colin Powell), and other fields of endeavor.   Sad, then, to read that 90 percent of CUNY freshmen could not solve a simple algebra problem when tested in 2008.   Even arithmetic baffled them: Two-thirds could not convert a fraction to decimal.   This after years of news stories about improved test scores and graduation rates for city schools.   The usual response from local politicians is that the school system needs more money.   Odd: New York State, with the city well in line, spent $15,981 per public school student in 2007.   The U.S. average is $9,666 - just three-fifths of the New York figure.   The city is in any case flat broke, with the mayor demanding 8 percent budget cuts.   What's to be done?   Ship students to Utah, perhaps.   The Beehive State spent only $5,683 per student, yet math-test results are well-nigh identical with New York's.

[For those who are part of the generations who have been prevented from learning the things in math that are needed for our survival as a free nation, start reading and studying on your own and stop using the computer and electronic calculator until you understand what those machines are doing in the mathematical sense.   Some of the older folks believe that those who do not understand simple arithmetic and algebra are less than human.   In a sense, I believe that they are correct.   For instance, how many are aware of the mathematical tricks that the IRS uses to fool you into thinking they are helping you?]


From Fox News, February 3, 2010

In South Carolina, there is a movement from the communists (progressives, whatever) in the educational system to cut back on history for high school students by having them learn U.S. history only from 1877 to the present.   Global "history" (probably from USESCO) will take the place of the U.S. history that is not presented to the students.   Needless to say, this is an attempt to continue to erase and alter history to prevent nationalism (patriotism) from our youth.

These traitors in education are going to throw out the older textbooks and bring in new ones.   The newer ones are always more leftist than the older ones as they boil the frog more with each new generation of Americans.   Of course they say that these changes will help the students.  

 

Back to Critical Thinking

Back to California Threatened by Communism

Main Menu