RUTHFULLY YOURS

In early 2011 I became involved with the Florida Textbook Action Team with information that was supplied to us by Dr. William A. Saxton, Chairman of the Citizens for National Security (CFNS). Based on this groups 13 month research into the History/Social Studies books being used in Florida schools today, we as a group engaged in contacting our local school boards protesting the textbooks favor of Islam over Christianity and Judaism and presentation of  an unfair view of history, particularly with regard to the policies of the U.S. and Israel.

The report identified approximately 30 textbooks used in Florida public schools with instances of bias, inaccuracies and purposeful omissions. It alleges that students are being given flawed information about the history of Islam, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Middle East, and Islamist extremist threats worldwide. It includes showing over 200 quotations from the list of textbooks that CFNS shows are biased and/or inaccurate.

One example in the report is when a textbook states, “Women, as wives and mothers, have an honored position in Saudi society.” Another article states, “The land now called Palestine consists of Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.”

Dr. Saxton stated, “Although agenda-based campaigns to shape textbook content have existed for some time, the past decade has seen particularly aggressive, intense overt and stealth efforts by proponents of Islam to inject their beliefs into K-12 classrooms via textbooks.”

Just last year parents in Bedford, NH pulled their son out of his local high school after the teen was assigned a book that refers to Jesus Christ as a “wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist.”  “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America,” was a required reading assignment for the High School’s Finance class. The book is a first-person account of author Barbara Ehrenreich’s attempts to make ends meet while working minimum wage jobs in Florida, Maine and Minnesota.

In addition to taking aim at the idea of the American Dream and arguing for a higher minimum wage, Ehrenreich also takes aim at Christians and other groups in the book and uses foul language — all of which made this NH family very unhappy.

Florida is not alone in this battle.  Last year, complaints were made to the Principal and Bedford School Board in NH with basically deaf ears. In Florida the blame for this goes back and forth between County school districts and the FL Dept. of Education for the responsibility of the books chosen. In the NH case, roughly three weeks after the complaint was filed, a review committee assembled by the school district ruled that despite its shortcomings, “the book provided valuable insight into the circumstances of the working poor and an opportunity for students to demonstrate mastery of the ‘Financial Impact’ competency.”

Larry Schweikart a professor of history at the University of Dayton and best selling author has written a book called 48 Liberal Lies About American History (That You Probably Learned in School).

 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.

Recently the Bradley Project on America’s National Identity outlined in its report, “E Pluribus Unum,”  a concern that America is in danger of losing a sense of national identity. They call 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.  It also suggests that we are not doing a good job of teaching students the fundamentals of American history, but we are succeeding in teaching them to be hyper-aware of the divisions among us rather than all that unites us.

So there are two things happening here.  We are producing students with the scantest of knowledge of American history and planting in them a distorted vision of what we do give them. It has been suggested we do not even need to teach any American history prior to the year 1865. Why is that? Isn’t America’s history as story of truth and exceptionalism? It is that very exceptionalism our enemies do not want our children to learn. Exceptionalism means were are different, not necessarily better, as in gloating.  It does lay out hope and a goal for other countries to achieve. Why else does everyone want to come to America? You do not hear about people moving to Cuba, Iran or Venezuela!

What about the additional issue of liberal bias in textbooks?

Professor Schweikart shows that photographs and their captions can often be good indicators of whether a history textbook has a point of view.  In his chapter on Ronald Reagan, Schweikart shows a photo of the Reagan’s 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 Kennedy’s 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.)

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.”

More lies: credit given to Mikhail Gorbachev for ending the Cold War and the almost non-existent credit given to Reagan;  in the discussion of how communism failed as a political and economic system, the only mention of Ronald Reagan is “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.” and “Bill Clinton was president when we were still trying to understand new attitudes about morality and sex;  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.”

Moms, Dads, Grandmothers and Grandfathers who today have the responsibility of raising our children MUST, to preserve America and who she is and for the Protection of the very children you are responsible for, read their textbooks, know what is happening in their classrooms and demand and push back against publishers who are printing these lies.  Go after the very Education systems who are turning a blind eye all with the use of your tax dollars. The fight is not going to be easy, but it will be worth it. For the time being, I recommend Home Schooling since some Charter schools are also betraying the children.

Trust me, these few examples are only the tip of the iceberg.  The list goes on and on.

This my friends is part of the set up by:  Marc Tucker, Hillary Clinton, the United Nations through UNESCO and the Earth Charter to socialize your children and if you think I am wrong, go look these individuals up and research their beliefs and above all, look up Marc Tucker’s letter to Hillary Clinton.