Posted on 11/04/2004 12:50:03 PM PST by Lindykim
by Phyllis Schlafly November 3, 2004
The flap over the Department of Education consigning 300,000 copies of "Helping Your Child to Learn History" to the dumpster is evidence anew that the Federal Government should have no role in education. Illiteracy and low scores in public schools are a national scandal, but it's hard to see how federal spending improves anything.
During the presidential campaign, both candidates vied with each other about how much federal money they would spend. John Kerry claimed that the Bush Administration failed to provide necessary funding for No Child Left Behind, and Bush spokesmen bragged that Bush "increased education funding more in four years than Bill Clinton did in eight years."
So what do we get for all this taxpayers' money? A case in point is the teaching of history. "Helping Your Child Learn History" was a 73-page booklet published by the Department of Education to give advice to parents of pre-school through fifth-grade children. The booklet gratuitously included several favorable references to the infamous "National Standards for United States History," even obliquely suggesting that President Bush supports those Standards.
When Lynne Cheney, the wife of the Vice President, spotted these references, her staff communicated displeasure to the Education Department. The Department then destroyed its inventory of 300,000 copies, or in bureaucratese "recycled" them. The UCLA professor who had been in charge of the National Standards project found this decision "extremely troubling." He called it "a pretty god-awful example of interference — intellectual interference. If that's not Big Brother or Big Sister, I don't know what is."
Note the inverted mindset of the typical academic. He thinks it is OK for Big Brother Federal Government to order students to study a revisionist, distorted, and inaccurate version of American history, but it is offensive for parents and citizens to demand that inaccuracies be omitted.
I suppose the liberals will soon be whining about "book burning," but as the media say, let's have a reality check. The National Standards for History was financed ten years ago by a $2 million grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to UCLA to write standards for how American history should be taught in grades 5 through 12.
The 271-page result, called National Standards for United States History, turned out to be so faulty as well as so anti-American that the Senate denounced it by a vote of 99-to-1. Lynne Cheney, who was NEH chairman when the grant was given, turned into a vigorous opponent, denouncing the volume as "politicized history," which it surely was. National Standards was not a narrative of past events but was leftwing revisionism and Political Correctness. Almost every event in American history was described as though it had race or gender motives and effects, and all ethnic groups except white males were portrayed as oppressed and mistreated.
The P.C. flavor was established right off the bat when National Standards taught that calendar dates should be identified as B.C.E. (Before the Common Era) or C.E. (Common Era), rather than as B.C. (as in Before Christ) or A.D. (as in Anno Domini). Leftwing bias showed itself in the skewed selection of historical figures. Dozens of obscure persons were singled out for study, while Paul Revere, Thomas Edison, the Wright brothers, General Robert E. Lee, Albert Einstein, Jonas Salk, and Gen. Douglas MacArthur were all omitted.
The anti-Communist Senator Joseph McCarthy received 19 unfavorable mentions, while students were told to study the influence of MTV, Madonna, Murphy Brown, and Roseanne, and to read Ms. Magazine and the writings of Betty Friedan and Margaret Sanger. The 1848 feminist Declaration at Seneca Falls was mentioned six times, putting it on a par with the Declaration of Independence and making it more important than the U.S. Constitution and the Gettysburg Address.
The late American Federation of Teachers chairman Al Shanker said that the History Standards was the first time a government ever tried to teach children to "feel negative about their own country."
After the national flap about the National Standards of United States History, the volume was slightly revised with cosmetic improvements. However, by that time the original volume had been shipped to school districts and book publishers, and no one knows which version is in more common use today.
Despite the discrediting of the taxpayer-financed History Standards project, it is obvious that the current crop of academic professionals is determined to drop the DWEMs (Dead White European Males) down an Orwellian Memory Hole and to replace history with Multiculturalism and Oppression Studies, featuring third-rate writers who attack Western Civilization as sexist, racist, and oppressive. Parents should check out the history books used in their local schools.
Phyllis Schlafly's new book The Supremacists: The Tyranny of Judges and How to Stop It is now available! Order online at 50% off retail price: http://www.eagleforum.org/
ping
When they go out and get jobs, if I am not mistaken, this will be the standard in place. I am pretty sure this is what is in use today, not AD/BC. But I could be wrong.
Can't imagine American history class without Revere, the Wright Bros, or Edison, though.
She is sooo right! This is the garbage being shoved down the throats of students by many where I teach.
In addition, the Professor has little actual understanding of Orwell or what he believed. If I went to UCLA and had him as a prof, I would demand a refund, but then again the ones I had at Maryland were not much better.
And this is in "Red State" Oklahoma.
We knew this was coming, are you surprised? I make sure my children know the truth at home, because you can't count on it in the schools.
Students are getting cheated daily and are in no way being properly prepared for the "real world", unless their parents take the extra step and "fill in the blanks".
The left basically destroyed one of the finest public education systems in the world over the past 40 years, simply because it allowed the poorer classes to compete with the "Prep School" kids.
Yes they do Phyllis. And what do we do in response? Well we increase their funding by close to 50%. Ah, the sweet stench of Conservatism singed by ill fated policy.
I'm scratching my head trying to think of a non-academic job in which one would ever refer to the era of a date.
Most of em would probably be academic. But any writing job where eras are covered. Publishers. Printers. You're right. Mostly academics and historians. But if the standard is what it is, then that should be what you teach, doncha think?
natural science museums - somewhat academic but not quite!
Thanks for the ping! I was just instinctually afraid that history is being skewed in the public school system, so I recently bought my son a book called "Under God" that gives the account of American history from a different perspective. At least, different from pub ed's version. I haven't read it myself yet, just the back cover and preface, which looked to my liking.
E-mail or FAX the White House to disband the Fed. Dept. of Education. Reagan campaigned he would do it. Would that Bush could deliver on this one - FOR THE GIPPER!
bump for later read
bttt
I'm attempting to coin a new term for the intellectual disease of inserting oppression thematics into every social analysis. I call it Post-Modern Tourette Syndrome.
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