Shocker: American History Textbooks Brimming With Leftist “Bias” – Education and Research Institute
I know, you’re shocked, shocked, to hear that the History textbooks used in most American high school classes have a Leftist bias. We all know this – but now the Education and Research Institute just released their study, “The American History Book Project” that documents this bias in great detail. The purpose of this project is to “provide a detailed critique of the weaknesses and shortcomings found in the four main American history textbooks used in secondary schools throughout the United States.”
From their critique of The American Pageant:
The American Pageant may be the bestselling American history textbook ever written. It has sold many millions of copies, and every year thousands of high school and college students are required to read it. Advanced Placement (AP) history courses in high schools especially like to use The American Pageant as their text.
The problem is that The American Pageant is unreliable. As a strongly biased textbook, it has distorted American history for three generations of students. Today too many students have little knowledge of the United States and the uniqueness of the American experience. Students’ lack of factual information can be traced to unreliable textbooks such as The American Pageant that are widely used in classrooms today….
My focus is on the flawed ideas in The American Pageant that mislead students into thinking that the United States is fundamentally corrupt, and that the world is often worse off because America exists and has so much global influence. How can current students become effective leaders in America’s future if they think their nation has been evil during so many eras of history? In my analysis of the flawed passages in the text, I will briefly explain the distortions, point out contradictions, and sometimes comment on the defective historical methods used.
The importance of this can’t be overstated. The distortion of history in order to make American students feel shame about their nation rather than the pride and gratitude that our actual history would engender is not only to steal from these kids, but to create for them a false reality from which their future decisions will be made. And that is theft, it’s tampering with the past to tamper with the future, it’s revisionism in a way seldom seen outside of Communist nations. As George Orwell (you remember him, the guy who wrote 1984, not as the user’s guide the Left seems to interpret it as, but the warning?) said, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” And this is a pure indication of who controls the present: Leftists more intent on controlling the future than on educating our children.
A travesty of the ugliest kind, and one that must be fought.
