I understand the desire for many conservatives to remove their kids from public schools. I largely agree. My own children attend Catholic schools and my wife and I are highly engaged in their education.
Thanks for the many responses though I am surprised that no one has fingered Charles Beard as a culprit in the decline of American history teaching.
Finally, yes I am required to use this text. As an adjunct I have no say in the selection of texts for the class. I take pains to point out inconsistencies and what I consider errors on the part of the publishers when I present their powerpoints. One good thing, since Christmas break is upon us next week, I have a full month to go through the 30 odd Powerpoints provided by the publisher and edit them to better suit what I think should be the focus of American history.
Good for you! So many teachers in the universities don’t know or don’t care what kind of lies they are teaching the kids via these socialist textbooks.
There’s a lot of good stuff in this thread. The question as always is, “What is to be done?”And there, since your plaint majors on the deficiencies of your school’s textbook, I have to raise the issue of the KhanAcademy.org website. I honestly don’t know if Salman Khan is the one we looked for, "or look we for another.” But I know that Khan’s lectures in math are good - and that Khan himself says that his lectures do not replace teachers but they can replace textbooks. So whether or not Khan himself is the answer to bad social studies textbooks, he does at least potentially point the way toward the overthrow of the textbook publishing empire. Perhaps you could take up his mantle in terms of teaching history, evaluating Khan’s work on history, and if necessary doing your own series of YouTube lectures as a complement/counterpoint to it.
You are laboring to check political correctness, and I can’t (OK, I won’t) forebear to propose what I consider a deep cause of political correctness. It started in the mid-Nineteenth Century and it is still with us, and still powerful, today. Namely, the Associated Press. Before the advent of the AP, newspapers were about the opinions of their printers, and newspapers were notorious for not agreeing with each other about much of anything. In fact, when the AP was accreting its propaganda power and was challenged on the centralization it entailed, the AP deflected the challenge by noting that it was just a bunch of newspapers with various viewpoints, and the AP itself was - wait for it - “objective.” But there is a principled objection to that claim. Two, in fact.
First of all,
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary. - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (Book I, Ch 10)The AP consists of a continuous virtual “meeting” of all the important people of the trade of journalism. It has been going on continuously for so long that it is inevitable that the AP functions in the interest of journalists and - to the extent that the two may be different - not in the interest of the public. What might be the difference between the interests of journalists and the interests of the public?The natural disposition is always to believe. It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough. The wisest and most cautious of us all frequently gives credit to stories which he himself is afterwards both ashamed and astonished that he could possibly think of believing.Journalists want to be believed, and journalists want to lead. Nothing wrong with that, provided that they tell the (whole) truth, and lead in wise directions. But as the earlier Adam Smith quote points out, the presumption must be that in all their conferring, not about merriment and diversion but precisely about business, journalists will hit on ways to promote themselves at the expense of the public. In order to promote themselves they might practice on the public’s credulity by unfairly playing “the critic” who presumes superiority over “the man who is actually in the arena,” as Theodore Roosevelt famously put it. Thus someone who performs a service to the public by providing, say, food, or water, or clothing might be unfairly criticized for the quality of their merchandise or the cost, or the working conditions of employees, or pollution, the list is endless. And politicians who go along with such unfairness might be given good PR, while politicians who do not do so might be assigned negative labels and otherwise impugned. Not that that would ever really happen. </sarcasm>The man whom we believe is necessarily, in the things concerning which we believe him, our leader and director, and we look up to him with a certain degree of esteem and respect. But as from admiring other people we come to wish to be admired ourselves; so from being led and directed by other people we learn to wish to become ourselves leaders and directors. And as we cannot always be satisfied merely with being admired, unless we can at the same time persuade ourselves that we are in some degree really worthy of admiration; so we cannot always be satisfied merely with being believed, unless we are at the same time conscious that we are really worthy of belief. As the desire of praise and that of praise-worthiness, though very much a-kin, are yet distinct and separate desires; so the desire of being believed and that of being worthy of belief, though very much a-kin too, are equally distinct and separate desires.
The desire of being believed, the desire of persuading, of leading and directing other people, seems to be one of the strongest of all our natural desires. - Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments
The second principled objection to the claim that journalists in the AP clique are objective is that journalists use that claim to precisely the same intent and effect that the ancient Greek Sophists used their claims of superior wisdom: the whole point is to shut down any attempt to debate the claimant’s policy proposals on the basis of facts and logic. In short, while any honest attempt at objectivity is laudable, arguing from a claim actually to be objective is sophistry.