Previously we commented on how “AP” (“advanced placement”) history books “for the smart kids”, supposedly written by thoughtful objective historians, use the Associated Press “AP” as their ghost writers.
Read this article from Courtney O’Brien at Townhall which provides references to a more extensive critique of the situation in history text books . . . and what to do about it at the local level. (excerpt)
History Expert Sounds Off on School Textbook That Has Inaccuracy on ‘Almost Every Other Page’
Conservatives have long complained about schools’ use of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. But, a popular AP U.S. History textbook, The American Pageant, written by Thomas Bailey, David Kennedy, and Lizabeth Cohen, is also riddled with inaccuracies. That’s according to Daniel Oliver, chairman of the board of the Education and Research Institute.
“Almost every other page” has liberal bias, Oliver charged during an interview with Townhall on Tuesday.
His “favorite” example, he said, is the book’s section on Alger Hiss. It’s well known that Hiss was a communist who was supplying information to the Soviet Union, Oliver relayed. He was convicted of perjury in 1948. Yet, in The American Pageant, the authors write that Hiss was being chased by Richard Nixon, a “red hunter,” and that he got caught in “embarrassing falsehoods.”
Oliver calls the description “extraordinary” and “ridiculous.”
“He was a communist,” Oliver said. “But the left decided to take the position that he was not.
Oliver and his team expose what they believe are other misinterpretations in trueamericanhistory.us. For instance, they note how the authors praise Franklin Delano Roosevelt as “suave and conciliatory” and a “master politician,” while avoiding how he “often tried to initiate and use government subsidies to win targeted voting groups, which ran up the national debt to record amounts” and “had trouble telling the truth,” ERI writes.
It’s also up to public institutions like ERI to “come in and raise a ruckus so that school boards will pick better textbooks.” . . .
Text book decisions are not solely the realm of local school boards. State legislation about integrity in presentation should be considered as well as attention to the state education bureaucracy and its influence. But it is a sad commentary that conservatives have largely abandoned children to local school boards often dominated by NEA types and the university teacher mills and their program of post modern indoctrination .
