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Schweikart examined the top-selling U.S. history textbooks, along with other resources used in public schools, and found them seriously flawed. Not only were liberal lies pervasive, so was a negative view of America. As he writes in the book’s introduction, modern textbooks often portray America as “a racist, sexist, imperialist regime.” Good news is often omitted, while America’s failings are emphasized.
My last column discussed the findings of the Bradley Project on America’s National Identity as outlined in its report, “E Pluribus Unum.” Concerned that America is in danger of losing a sense of national identity, the Bradley Project calls upon educators to move away from highlighting what’s wrong with America over what is right, and to promote a shared sense of American identity rather than emphasize our ethnic, racial and religious differences.
But what about the additional issue of liberal bias in textbooks?
Schweikart writes that photographs and their captions can often be good indicators of whether a history textbook has a point of view. In one of his chapters on Ronald Reagan, Schweikart shows a photo of the Reagans dancing at their inaugural. Here’s his caption: “Historians always attach a caption to a picture such as this that mentions how wealthy the Reagans’ supporters were, or how they ushered in a decade of greed. But all presidents have had grand inaugural balls, and the 1980s witnessed the greatest boom in the nation’s economy for all groups in 60 years, thanks to ‘Reaganomics.’”
So I took a look through the textbook seventh-graders at a school in my area will be using this year to study American history — A History of the US: All the People Since 1945, written by Joy Hakim.
Sure enough, here’s the caption from that textbook under a photo of the Reagans at their inaugural celebration. “Nancy and Ronald Reagan at one of their inauguration parties, held in Washington’s Air and Space Museum. A black-tie, mink, and diamond affair, it was the fanciest, most expensive inauguration in American history, costing five times more than Jimmy Carter’s inaugural had.”
Contrast that with the caption under a photo of the Kennedys en route to their inaugural celebration: “President Kennedy and his wife, Jackie, on their way to the inaugural ball. Her glamour nearly stole the show.” (For the record, JFK is in white-tie.)
And what about the Clintons’ inaugural celebrations? Here’s how the caption reads under a photo of Bill Clinton playing the saxophone: “Newly elected President Bill Clinton plays his saxophone at one of the Inauguration Night balls. Clinton loves music, especially jazz, and is a strong supporter of music education in public schools.”
Give me a break. And while such clear bias may be evident when comparing such items side-by-side, as it were, students coming across each captioned picture separately would be left with a different impression. They would have “learned” that the Reagans socialized with rich people and spent way too much money on their inaugural balls, Jackie Kennedy was glamorous, and Bill Clinton supported music in schools!
Lie #9 in Schweikart’s book concerns the credit given to Mikhail Gorbachev for ending the Cold War, and the almost non-existent credit given to Reagan. Schweikart quotes from a textbook called Unto a Good Land: “Perhaps more important [than Reagan], under a new, younger leadership, the Kremlin allowed long-dormant forces of change to emerge and drive the USSR toward democracy and a market economy.”
In that seventh-grade textbook children in my area will be studying this year, there is a chapter called “The End of the Cold War.” In the discussion of how communism failed as a political and economic system, the only mention of Ronald Reagan is this sentence – in parantheses no less! “(Trying to keep up with Reagan-era military might have helped do it.)” So how and why exactly did communism end? “When the Russian people had had enough, they just threw communism out.”
The textbook tenth-graders will be using in another nearby school is much the same. Glencoe World History, by Jackson J. Spielvogel, is shocking in the credit it gives to Gorbachev for ending communism. Listen to this blatant falsehood: “When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union, the Cold War suddenly ended. His ‘New Thinking’ — his willingness to rethink Soviet foreign policy — led to stunning changes.”
What are the actual facts which these seventh- and tenth-graders will not learn? Information from Reagan’s personal diaries makes it clear that he believed communism was repressive, cruel and inhuman. Again, from his diaries, one aspect of it he found particularly repugnant was its denial of religious freedom. So he and his advisers plotted and planned for years with the goal of lifting the yoke of communism from the backs of millions of people peacefully.
What about the National Security Decision Directives the Reagan administration issued in 1982 to bankrupt the Soviet system? What about the Reagan-approved CIA plan which allowed the Soviets to “steal” high-tech equipment for their oil pipeline, equipment specially designed to fail when it went online? Talk about a story young students would find fascinating!
As Schweikart puts it: “Across the board, using American banks and bullets, money and missiles, technology and diplomacy, the United States put a full-court press on the Soviet Union.” The Soviet economy didn’t just fail. The fall of communism didn’t suddenly happen. And the Berlin Wall didn’t crumble of its own accord. But our children won’t learn the whole truth in school, thanks to the blatantly biased textbooks they study.
But if you really want to get incensed, read what that seventh-grade textbook says about Bill Clinton and Ken Starr. “When Whitewater didn’t produce any evidence of wrong-doing, special prosecutor Ken Starr turned the investigation from one direction to another. In the process of doing that, he ignored long-cherished legal traditions – such as the privacy of lawyer-and-client confidences – with chilling power. But he did find Clinton’s flaw.”
The textbook then sets up Clinton’s eventual impeachment, and his affair with Monica Lewinsky, with this excuse: “Bill Clinton was president when we were still trying to understand new attitudes about morality and sex. Television and films were bombarding us with images that had once been seen only in private.” It then lays blame at the feet of Ken Starr and the press: “In the case of President William Jefferson Clinton, the special prosecutor and the press went far beyond the bounds of good taste or legal necessity in describing the president’s relations with a woman who worked in the White House. We learned details of his private life that no one wanted to know. But the dangers of a runaway prosecutor seemed less important than something the president did. When faced with disturbing accusations about his personal life, Clinton was not honest.”
And trust me, those few examples are only the tip of the iceberg. The list goes on and on.
So you might want to take a long, hard look through your children’s history textbooks and then prepare for a long, hard fight with the Board of Ed.
Visit Marcia Segelstein’s blog — she values your comments and ideas!
Last 5 posts by Allen
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Recently:
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