The Left’s Attempt to Institutionalize the Re-writing of US History

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Ron Radosh:

Recently, a few conservative intellectuals have raised serious questions about the College Board’s effort to develop a new curriculum for the Advanced Placement in History courses. Stanley Kurtz, in “The  Corner” atNational Review Online, writes that “This Framework will effectively force American high schools to teach U.S. history from a leftist perspective.” Naturally, the College Board argues that its intent is only to provide “balance,” to streamline the curriculum, and enhance teacher flexibility. In other words, all benign matters that educators should welcome.

Are Kurtz and the other critics, like National Association of Scholars executive Peter Wood, right in their criticism? Wood argues in a preliminary report , like Kurtz, that “this newest revision, however, is radical.” The Board, he notes citing other critics, is substituting a specific curriculum in place of their previous broad frameworks, promoting a negative view of the United States, and erasing major figures (the Founding Fathers, of course) from American History.

Wood is concerned that “perhaps more than other parts of the college curriculum,” the Board is turning history “into a platform for political advocacy and for animus against traditional American values.”   Moreover, he thinks that the “College Board has turned AP U.S. History into a briefing document on progressive and leftist views of the American past.  It is something that weaves together a vaguely Marxist or at least materialist reading of the key events with the whole litany of identity group grievances.”

We have seen this particularly in the books of Howard Zinn and his followers, and in the book and video series on World War II and the Cold War by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick. And as we know, their works are widely adopted in the assigned readings of many high school teachers and college professors. Within the academy, there has also been a widespread adoption of monographs that are based on race, class and gender to the exclusion of the old type of political history that once exemplified the best the profession had to offer.

These charges have led to an attack on the Board’s critics, as revealed in this harsh column in The Los Angeles Times by  columnist Michael Hiltzik. Its blaring headline reads: “The right wing steps up its attack on the teaching of U.S. history.” Rather than address the substance of the claims made by critics like Wood and Kurtz, Hiltzik offers his readers a standard left-wing McCarthyite smear, arguing that it is nothing less than “an anti-intellectual assault.” He continues to accuse Kurtz of advocating that a “grand conspiracy” exists made up of left-leaning history professors to emasculate their profession by belying the concept of “American exceptionalism.” (Kurtz’s answer to Hiltzik can be found here.)

To find out the accuracy of the claims made by Kurtz and Wood, I read the College Board report. As a historian of recent America, 1900 to the present, and U.S. foreign policy in the 20th Century, I evaluate what the curriculum offers in the area of my own expertise. I’ll start with Period 7, 1890-1945. Take as an example how it frames questions about Progressivism and The New Deal. The report puts it this way:

Progressive reformers responded to economic instability, social inequality, and political corruption by calling for government intervention in the economy, expanded democracy, greater social justice, and conservation of natural resources.

There is no indication that progressive reform actually may have been instituted by corporate regulators for their own benefit, at the expense of small manufacturers and producers. This argument, by historians like Gabriel Kolko, James Weinstein and Martin J.Sklar, whose pioneering work changed the standard view of progressivism, is not even raised as an alternative way to comprehend the Progressive era. The paragraph as structured reflects the old traditional left/liberal view of the Progressive Era, and takes it as a given.

Referring to the New Deal era, the authors write:

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In light of the dismal history socialism has brought the world, it is best for the left to make the successes of capitalism and conservatism seem a little less successful.

The AP standards shortchange people and events such as excluding discussion of the U.S. military, battles, commanders, and heroes, as well as mentioning many other individuals and events that shaped history like the Holocaust and American icons Albert Einstein, Jonas Salk, George Washington Carver, and Dr. Martin Luther King.
As soon as people stop learning such a thing as ”the Holocaust” happened in their schooling they can easily swallow that it was a myth.
We even saw that with a skewed Common Core test question based on the idea of it as a myth.
More than half the students answered that it was a myth, after reading the paragraphs and comparing it to their own educational vacuum in that area.
Most people in the ME think it was a myth while thinking that the forgery book, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (with its claim that non-Jewish children’s blood is added to Matzos for Passover) is the real deal!
Education is a big deal.
It should not be turned into a propaganda tool here in the USA.

Conservatives and moderates need to infiltrate and retake the education system from the progressive “good think” politicized machine. I can only hope that this big shove left will be seen as what it really is. Indoctrination Propaganda.

If you indoctrinate the minds of children through education with clever Marxist phrasing, you will control the future.

Give the teachers a raise, propaganda is a full-time job.

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
Brought to you by Joseph Goebbels, your friendly Nazi minister of propaganda
Now who holds that position in the fool’s administration?