No wonder so many people find history boring
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,” “idiot,” “imbecile,” “Redskin,” “sissy,” “suffragette” and “waitress.”
A team of 16 academic reviewers in Texas, the second-largest state market for textbooks behind California, last year found 533 factual and interpretive errors in 28 social studies texts submitted for adoption by the state board of education.
“Almost all of 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 of 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 or dance the rumba.”
Historian David McCullough, who won two Pulitzer Prizes for his biographies of Presidents John Adams and Harry Truman, also calls school history and 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 these books would ask, ‘What did I do wrong today that I am being so punished?’”
Okay, I keep finding more passages I want to quote, so I’m going to quit before I post the whole thing. Just click over and read the article.
Hat tip: The Homeschool Cafe
