By Phyllis Schlafly
Mata Musing: Just as I adamantly believe Muslim youths and their education are the key to future peace in the world, so goes the grooming of our own American children.
For too long the "revisionist history" crowd has retained a rigor mortus death grip on authoring American history textbooks, subtlely infusing an anti-American curriculum in our public schools. It's no wonder that astute parents rebel with their support of private schools and home-schooling.
I also agree about the wasted federal funds on education. While it may evoke that warm, fuzzy feeling for Congressional members to allocate beaucoup bucks "for the children", once out of sight, the cash is misspent and ill-applied as it travels down the food chain. The results are that our kids are still laboring under low-standards and an agenda riddled curriculum that has little to do with education as we knew it in our youth.
All parents should be required to pick up and read the American History textbooks issued to their children. For I'm quite sure most would be aghast at the twists on events that result in nothing more than "hate America first" being taught to America's next generation of leaders.
Excerpts:
"Helping Your Child Learn History" was a 73-page booklet published by the Department of Education to give advice to parents of preschool 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 Dick Cheney, spotted those references, her staff communicated displeasure to the Education Department, which then destroyed its inventory of 300,000 copies, or in bureaucratese, "recycled" them.
The University of California Los Angeles 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."
(snip)
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 U.S. Senate denounced it by a vote of 99-to-1. Lynne Cheney, who was National Endowment for the Humanities chairwoman 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 left-wing revisionism and political correctness. Almost every event in U.S. 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 PC flavor was established right off the bat when "National Standards" taught that calendar dates should be identified as BCE (before the Common Era) or CE (Common Era), rather than as B.C., as in before Christ, or A.D., as in Anno Domini, Latin for year of Our Lord.
Left-wing bias showed itself in the skewed selection of historical figures. Dozens of obscure people were singled out for study, while Paul Revere, Thomas Edison, Orville and Wilbur Wright, Gen. Robert E. Lee, Albert Einstein, Jonas Salk and Gen. Douglas MacArthur were omitted.
Anti-Communist Sen. 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, N.Y., 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 Albert Shanker said that "History Standards" was the first time a government tried to teach children to "feel negative about their own country."
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