I heard that one a month ago; it's incredibly chickenshit that a high school history textbook was written by a non-historian, but if anyone reads James Loewen's "Lies My Teacher Told Me" (1995) they will find out that many of the history textbooks are written by scads of ghostwriters, especially the books in their 10th or 12 editions. Loewen reported such errors as the US winning the Korean War by atomic bombing have been printed in the 1970s-1980s textbooks he reviewed, so screwing up the Civil War is not new.
And this is why we shouldn't let those children of college professors into public schools! What pains in the ass!
Like Strelnikov, this is old news to me...thanks to Long Suffering Colleague Up in Virginia...it's the South...but not? I am surprised, however, that given Strelnikov's revolutionary tendencies, he did not note the fantastic similarity between the "let's put in stickers with the right information" strategy and the Czech "let's just use black marker to cross out people we don't like in our history books" strategy of the revolutionary era...
(I think it was the revolutionary era...we're talking here about a vague memory I have from a student-written paper about visual representations of social problems...she probably researched it on the internet anyway.)
ps: The longer I think about that comment, the more I am uncertain about who exactly was doing this and when but you can bet that someone someplace asked students to use black ink to redact unpopular historical figures from textbooks!
Man...get me too far from Starvistan and I know exactly nothing.
I've heard those stories from the Warsaw Pact states, but if that was ever done, it was a temporary measure until the old books were collected and pulped with new "improved" textbooks in their place. BlackDog may be thinking of the photographs that were blackened out in the USSR during the "Great Terror" of 1935-8 that were featured in the coffee-table book "The Commissar Vanishes." When it comes to the USSR and the Warsaw Pact states, stories of that type have to be questioned because there are bits of disinformation* from Western intelligence agencies still floating around from the Cold War as "common knowledge."
Our problem with high-school history textbooks is very simple; there are no national standards. Instead the textbook publishers have to deal with pressure groups, state review boards, etc. so that California may have one textbook and Texas and the South have completely different textbooks (or a modified version of the CA. book) because of the issue of slavery and the Civil War. It's a stupid system and it creates more problems then it solves. I know that Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" is used in AP History classes, but that's only in certain states and for the "advanced" students. They need to be doing better in all subjects.
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* Meanwhile, actual Cold War activities of the CIA are totally buried even today; for example, the purgative ipecac was put in East German schoolchildren's milk in the 1950s to drive a wedge between the children and the state (William Blum, "The CIA: A Forgotten History.")
Joe Queenan, in his book, "Balsamic Dreams: A Short But Self-Important History of the Baby Boomer Generation," noted the novelty of this, and had a term for it: educated barbarians.
I heard that one a month ago; it's incredibly chickenshit that a high school history textbook was written by a non-historian, but if anyone reads James Loewen's "Lies My Teacher Told Me" (1995) they will find out that many of the history textbooks are written by scads of ghostwriters, especially the books in their 10th or 12 editions. Loewen reported such errors as the US winning the Korean War by atomic bombing have been printed in the 1970s-1980s textbooks he reviewed, so screwing up the Civil War is not new.
ReplyDeleteAnd this is why we shouldn't let those children of college professors into public schools! What pains in the ass!
ReplyDeleteLike Strelnikov, this is old news to me...thanks to Long Suffering Colleague Up in Virginia...it's the South...but not? I am surprised, however, that given Strelnikov's revolutionary tendencies, he did not note the fantastic similarity between the "let's put in stickers with the right information" strategy and the Czech "let's just use black marker to cross out people we don't like in our history books" strategy of the revolutionary era...
(I think it was the revolutionary era...we're talking here about a vague memory I have from a student-written paper about visual representations of social problems...she probably researched it on the internet anyway.)
ps: The longer I think about that comment, the more I am uncertain about who exactly was doing this and when but you can bet that someone someplace asked students to use black ink to redact unpopular historical figures from textbooks!
ReplyDeleteMan...get me too far from Starvistan and I know exactly nothing.
I've heard those stories from the Warsaw Pact states, but if that was ever done, it was a temporary measure until the old books were collected and pulped with new "improved" textbooks in their place. BlackDog may be thinking of the photographs that were blackened out in the USSR during the "Great Terror" of 1935-8 that were featured in the coffee-table book "The Commissar Vanishes." When it comes to the USSR and the Warsaw Pact states, stories of that type have to be questioned because there are bits of disinformation* from Western intelligence agencies still floating around from the Cold War as "common knowledge."
ReplyDeleteOur problem with high-school history textbooks is very simple; there are no national standards. Instead the textbook publishers have to deal with pressure groups, state review boards, etc. so that California may have one textbook and Texas and the South have completely different textbooks (or a modified version of the CA. book) because of the issue of slavery and the Civil War. It's a stupid system and it creates more problems then it solves. I know that Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" is used in AP History classes, but that's only in certain states and for the "advanced" students. They need to be doing better in all subjects.
___________________________________________
* Meanwhile, actual Cold War activities of the CIA are totally buried even today; for example, the purgative ipecac was put in East German schoolchildren's milk in the 1950s to drive a wedge between the children and the state (William Blum, "The CIA: A Forgotten History.")
Oh, geez. Could you give us some more Cold War background, but only stuff we can't find in the mainstream media.
ReplyDeleteI'm waiting...
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Joe Queenan, in his book, "Balsamic Dreams: A Short But Self-Important History of the Baby Boomer Generation," noted the novelty of this, and had a term for it: educated barbarians.
ReplyDelete