Hans Bader is a graduate of Harvard Law School and a former attorney at the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights. Recently, he took a gander at his third grade daughter’s history textbook, Our World Far and Wide, and was flummoxed at the degree of political correctness embedded in its pages.
“Its false claims may reflect a clumsy, ham-handed attempt to make certain people (like minority children and residents of non-wealthy areas) feel better about themselves. But it is unlikely to achieve anything other than depriving kids of a solid grasp of their country’s history,” he writes.
From his article at Liberty Unyielding:
The book’s claims about history are also very misleading. It depicts a nation in Africa [Mali] that had little effect on the world as one of the world’s three great civilizations. And its portrait of seven great Americans includes relatively insignificant black and Hispanic activists in order to make a majority of the seven be black or Hispanic.
[…] two of them are historically relatively insignificant figures chosen to make it look like most historically-significant Americans were non-white. In addition to three white males included because they were indispensable in creating and preserving America (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln), it also lists four black and Hispanic people of lesser importance. Two of those four were major historical figures in their own right: Martin Luther King, and Thurgood Marshall, who became the first black Supreme Court justice, and successfully argued Brown v. Board of Education. The other two listed as among the seven great Americans were far less significant, however.
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For example, Cesar Chavez was added to the list, even though he merits but a footnote in American history. He was the leader of an agricultural union, but his union was tiny and uninfluential in comparison to more significant unions like the American Federation of Labor founded by Samuel Gompers, or John Lewis’s United Mine Workers. Chavez did not cause the passage of any significant labor legislation, either. Nor did he shape immigration law in any major way (Chavez opposed illegal immigration that could undercut the wages of U.S.-born Mexican-American laborers, and called illegal aliens “wetbacks.”)
Such textbooks are not out of the ordinary. In the 1990s, noted historian Arthur Schlesinger pointed out many absurdities taught in history classes, all in the name of “diversity.” For example, in his book The Disuniting of America he shows that the New York State history curriculum included a standard on how the American Founding was influenced. in part, by the “Haudenosaunee political system.”
The what?
The historian notes that any effect this system had on the development of the Constitution was marginal at best; for European intellectuals it was non-existent. But — no state has an Iroquois lobby like New York does.
Gilbert Sewall, director of the American Textbook Council, expressed similar feelings when new history standards rolled out in the mid-1990s:
The standards reinvented the European discovery of the New World, changing a once triumphal Columbian conquest into a three-way “encounter” of Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans. From the beginning, disease-carrying Europeans encounter and enslave innocent people of color. Older paradigms of federalism, industrialism, and expansionism were minimized, along with heroic figures and their achievements. Hamilton end Jefferson, the Erie Canal, Gettysburg, and Promontory Point did not exactly vanish, but they were not much savored either. Teachers and students inherited a solemn, often bitter chronicle of unfulfilled national promise. Historical sufferers and victim groups receive belated recognition and redress. Participation in history becomes an empathetic act. By sharing the pain of exploited groups and learning the gloomy “truth” of the U.S. past, students presumably learn to become more virtuous and sensitive.
“As a history major, and constitutional lawyer who studies and writes about legal history,” Bader concludes, “I am embarrassed by the book ‘Our World Far and Wide,’ and the fact that it is used in schools in my state. But sadly, it’s far from the worst history textbook used in the nation’s schools, as you can find by doing searches on Google.”
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