A Trip to the the Book Store
by Kathy Brown on September 9th, 2009 | 0 comments
Tucker Carlson recently hosted, on the Fox network, an entire program on American textbooks. Here are a few excerpts from an accompanying opinion piece (italicized words added/September 3, 2009):
1. “The educators who wrote them (textbooks) weren’t interested in describing the world as it was, or had been, but rather as they wanted it to be. They were ideologues, and my math and history books were their pamphlets, disguised as academic texts.”
2. “First to go (in textbooks) were words containing the dreaded term “man,” the three letters most offensive to professional feminists. Mailman, chairman, snowman, fisherman, manhole cover—every one now extinct, disdained relics of a bygone age.”
3. “When asked about the Vietnam War recently, almost a quarter of the students described it as a conflict between North and South Korea.”
4. “A thorough cover-to-cover reading of almost any high school history text leaves you with the impression that the United States is at best embarrassing, and at worst a menace to world peace.”
5. “The internment of Japanese-Americans during World War Two gets almost as much emphasis as the American liberation of Europe.”
6. “Non-American cultures, by contrast, receive every benefit of every doubt. Try to find a high school textbook that even mentions the widespread practice of slavery among American Indians.”
7. “Even September 11, an event hardly shrouded by the haze of time, gets a rewrite. In Prentice Hall’s textbook on contemporary American history, for instance, the 19 hijackers are not identified as Islamic extremists. Students are left to guess why they did it.”
It has been many years since my parental duties led me to read the material my children were assigned. The public school was, even then, developing a frontal attack on the values that have traditionally made for good families, moral responsibility and limited government. It was surprising to see how young children were introduced to the promotion of homosexuality, relative ethics and socialism. The efforts made by parents to change this pattern were unsuccessful. Those who were able to exit the onslaught of indoctrination did. Unfortunately, many who wanted to leave could not afford to.
After a rigorous study in worldview, Foundational Presupposition Chart, it is not surprising that public education’s curriculum has taken on the characteristics of secular humanism. What is remarkable is that it has been deemed “neutral” and not religious in nature. Until there is a cultural consensus that our tax dollars prefer one view over another, we are likely stuck with an upcoming generation unable to stand up against twelve plus years of pounding down the foundation that many parents have tried to vigorously build.
Who pays for all the textbooks that end up in the backpacks of our young ones? We as much as took all those little hands in ours, marched them into the book store and bought every word that will be read and studied. But maybe the ideas presented won’t hatch into anything, and education has no affect on thinking. Perhaps we should look around and see if that’s true.
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