Textbook Wars

I saw Duane Lester's rock-and-roll roundup yesterday morning and said, "Hey, where's the love, yo?" (See, "Weekend Link Love: Aerosmith Edition.") Just kidding. Actually, I wanted to highlight another one of Duane's entries, "My First Pajamas Media Article: Homeschooling vs. Howard Zinn." Duane's a home-school dad, and he writes:

If my child were in a public school, what would they be learning from?

One of the more popular texts is The People’s History of the United States by the late Howard Zinn, a radical Marxist.

As noted on Big Hollywood, Zinn not only admitted his text is biased, he said he wanted it to be “part of the social struggle”:

I wanted my writing of history and my teaching of history to be a part of the social struggle. I wanted to be a part of history and not just a recorder of history and a teacher of history. So that kind of attitude towards history, history itself is a political act, has always informed my writing and my teaching.

For an example of how bizarre Zinn’s accounting of history is, consider his take on World War II. According to Zinn, America was at fault. We provoked Japan.

Zinn also fails to mention “Washington’s Farewell Address, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Reagans’ speech at the Brandenburg Gate.” D-Day’s Normandy Beach invasion isn’t covered by Zinn, but he dedicates several pages to the My Lai Massacre. His efforts to paint America as an evil country are visible on every page of the text.

I have no idea how widely assigned is Howard Zinn's book at the individual level, although his ideological program is certainly widespread across the progressive school industry (as noted at Big Government above). As I wrote in January, upon Zinn's death:

I can't imagine any other public intellectuals who've contributed more to the soft-thinking destruction of generations of young Americans. Michelle Malkin has some background. See, "Hollywood & Howard Zinn’s Marxist Education Project," and "'Social Justice' for Grade-Schoolers: The Howard Zinn Education Project."

That said, I'm suspicious of blanket claims suggesting that the textbook curriculum is universallly left-wing. This Fox News report actually includes my current American government text, George C. Edwards', Government in America. Yet the book is explicitly neutral, and in fact, when I reviewed the material for the publisher I actually asked for more advocacy. The Edwards design (overtly balanced) is basically a model for how textbook authors should design their books. Also at the clip is Charles Hauss', Comparative Politics, which is a bit more left-leaning. Still, Hauss does NOT mount a radical left-wing indoctrination campaign in his writing. Perhaps it might be included in coverage on the "textbook wars," but that book is nothing at all like the curriculum of the Marxist Education Project, so folks should be aware of distinctions and act accordingly. A good teacher might well use moderately biased book to good advantage, by providing counter examples based on logic and empiricism. The Zinn program is, of course, an another story.