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THE E-FILES NUMBER NINE JULY-OCTOBER, 2001 THE SUBJECT OF THIS E-FILE IS AMERICAN HISTORY EDUCATION. THE TERRORIST ATTACKS of September have thrust to the forefront the issue of what America's children are learning about our history and what it means to be an American. Patriotic displays at schools have become the subject of controversy. SOME RECENT POST-ATTACK EVENTS: U.S. Education Secretary Rod Paige called on school principals to invite students, teachers, parents and others to join in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in classrooms across on the country on Friday, October 12 (seewww.celebrationusa.org/nsc.htm). University of Massachusetts physics professor Jennie Traschen objected to the flying of the flag in Amherst after the terrorist attacks because "It's a symbol of terrorism and death and fear and destruction and repression." The Rocklin, California ACLU demanded that a sign at an elementary school reading "God Bless America" be removed because the words send "a hurtful, divisive message". The Madison, Wisconsin school board voted to ban the Pledge of Allegiance from classrooms. After expressions of public outrage, the ban was reversed. A Sacramento, California public school teacher burned part of an American flag as part of a "revolutionary" teaching method. SOME DESCRIPTIONS OF HISTORY/SOCIAL STUDIES SCHOOL LESSONS OF THE PAST FEW YEARS: "I think my daughter was taught five years in a row in various elementary schools how horrible Columbus was." "Last year when my son was in public schools the teacher took my son's backpack, took his lunch sack out, opened his Doritos and ate them to show the class how it felt when Columbus stole from the Indians. My son was one of four students who had his lunch stolen by the teacher." "(A teacher friend of mine) regularly told her students to consider themselves "African" as a way of forming a connection with their ancestral homeland, and as a way to identify with a positive black heritage that didn't include violence, slothfulness or inattention during classes." "When I handed my 4th grade son's teacher a book about Pearl Harbor and asked him to please mention this day to students on December 7, he simply said they were not allowed to do that. It's no longer a rumor that our public schools are anti-patriotic-it's just plain blatant and very disturbing." "Currently in Katy (Texas) they just teach kids ABOUT communism, socialism, and fascism. They never tell the kids what is wrong with those forms of government. When they do that, it's like saying those methods of governing are on a par with capitalism-just another form of government. Misguided subtleties like this will cause the downfall of our country." "All Tucson Unified School District teachers...watched a video on diversity at our school....It was a three-hour diatribe by a woman named Jane Elliot against whites, conservatives, Christianity, men, private school teachers and the United States of America. This diatribe was liberally sprinkled with obscene language and was like watching a bizarre standup routine. Elliot started by telling us all whites are racists." "I am an adjunct instructor in a small college...To my utter amazement I found that none of my students had studied American history. They did not know anything about the Founding Fathers of this nation or why it was founded." "I have watched a lot of high school history classes over the last 20 years. Perhaps there was a time when teachers insisted that America was always right, but in most places such jingoistic tendencies are long gone. The kind of educators who gravitate towards social studies are the least likely to paint the blackboard red, white and blue." (Jay Matthews of the Washington Post, 10/9/01). FOR YEARS ARTICLES HAVE BEEN WARNING of the decline in historical knowledge of students. A National Endowment for the Humanities study showed twelve years ago that 40 percent of college students did not know the dates of the American Civil War. A National Constitution Center study in 1997 showed that most polled were "resoundingly ignorant" about the Constitution-not knowing the number of U.S. Senators, the names of the five rights guaranteed by the First Amendment, and so on. Jay Leno found in sidewalk interviews of teenagers that they recognized Joe Camel but not Joe Stalin, Little Caesar of the pizza brand but not Caesar Augustus, Captain Crunch but not Napoleon Bonaparte, Mr. Peanut but not Jimmy Carter, and Colonel Sanders but not Colonel Qadaffi. SOME BACKGROUND OF THE TEACHING OF HISTORY AND AMERICANISM: 1888: 'LOOKING BACKWARD' was published. The futurist novel by Edward Bellamy described a Utopian, socialist America in 2000. It eventually sold over a million copies. According to an article by Jim Peron, "The Pledge versus the Oath" in the May, 2001 issue of 'Ideas on Liberty' magazine, "John Dewey, the great advocate of government schooling...took many of his socialist ideas for education and indoctrination from Bellamy...Dewey was keenly interested in the Soviet Union and wrote articles praising the educational system imposed by the communists." 1892: THE PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE was written by Edward Bellamy's cousin, Francis. Jim Peron wrote that the cousins "were the two major spokesmen for ...the nationalization of all industry under state control. Across America some 167 Nationalist Clubs were formed." Francis decided "that a program was needed to teach American youth loyalty to the state. They realized that the individualist tradition in America did not lend itself easily to the "patriotism" needed for the socialist state of "Looking Backward". This culminated in the writing of the pledge. "Baer says Francis Bellamy acknowledged that his Pledge put forth the ideas of cousin Edward. Francis originally toyed with the idea of making the Pledge more openly socialistic but decided that if he did so it would never be accepted." (see www.vineyard.net/vineyard/history/pdgech0.htm ). Peron believes students should learn allegiance to the Constitution rather than the state. "AMERICAN HISTORY TEXTS GAINED GENERAL CURRENCY in the schools only in the 1890s. Before then, American history was not very widely taught. The public grade schools had very little history of any kind in their curricula, and the private academies that prepared students for colleges and universities concentrated on classical studies and European history," according to Frances Fitzgerald, who studied history texts from the Columbia University Teachers College collection and wrote of her findings in a 1979 book, "America Revised." She concluded that the purpose of the parties to the debate of textbook selection was not so much to inform as to manipulate children. TEXTBOOKS IN WIDE USE THROUGHOUT THE 1900s bear the names of "the most distinguished American historians", according to FitzGerald. She names historians Charles and Mary Beard, Richard Hofstadter, Merle Curti, John Hope Franklin, Ernest R. May, Henry Steele Commager, and Henry F. Graff. FitzGerald also discusses textbooks written by David Saville Muzzey and one of "the more left-wing writers of the period", Willis Mason West. ROSE L. MARTIN WROTE A COMPREHENSIVE BOOK CALLED "FABIAN FREEWAY: HIGH ROAD TO SOCIALISM IN THE U.S.A.", 1966. Martin describes how in 1883, a small British group of middle class intellectuals started the "revolutionary secret society, behind a beguiling false front of benevolence and learning." Its aim was to "penetrate and permeate organizations, social movements, political parties" in order to spread socialism slowly and secretively. www.fabian-society.org.uk/About/history.asp contains some history about the group, but not nearly as much as Martin's book. MARTIN WROTE, "The Herrons (trustees) decided to use the trust fund left by Elizabeth Rand to found a school in New York designed to use as "an intellectual center for the Socialist movement in the United States." The sum available was very much larger than the Hutchinson Trust employed by Sidney Webb to launch the London School of Economics. Moreover, unlike the London School, the Rand School of Social Science was not connected with any accredited university and thus did not feel constrained to dissemble its Socialist aims. Its functions more nearly approximated those of the Workers' Educational Association in Britain, which offered courses in Socialism to working men and women and trained future Trade Union and Labour Party officials." ONE OF THE MEMBERS of a three-man advisory committee for the Rand School was Professor Charles A. Beard of Columbia. He was also listed as a "faculty sponsor" of the ISS. The ISS was the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, which consisted of a "few hundred publicists and public figures usually better known for their activity in related organizations than in the parent group," (Martin, "Fabian Freeway"). "DR. BEARD, A WIDELY RESPECTED HISTORIAN, eventually renounced the Marxian approach to history after a lifetime as a Socialist. By that time, however, he had already produced a number of influential books, written jointly with his wife, Mary, that portrayed the Founding Fathers as self-interested spokesmen for the propertied clique and deprecated the American Constitution as a class-inspired document," wrote Martin. This Dr. Beard is the same Charles Beard who wrote history textbooks widely used in American classrooms for decades. In the E-Filer's hands is one, "The History of the American People", by Beard and Bagley, copyright 1918, 1920, 1923, 1928. It was revised and adopted by the California State Board of Education and printed by the California State printing office, Sacramento, California. A handsome painting of George Washington adorns the page opposite the title page. AMONG THE TEACHERS OF RAND SCHOOL, along with Charles Beard, was D.S. Muzzey, author of "American History", first published in 1911. Muzzey's text, according to Frances FitzGerald, "taught perhaps a majority of living Americans their history." "IN 1913, THE FIRST WORK BY THE PROGRESSIVE HISTORIAN WILLIS MASON WEST" appeared, according to FitzGerald. "West, in his 'American History and Government', came as close as any text writer has ever done to making a class-conflict model of American history....it spoke of the "warlike" relation between labor and capital at the beginning of the century." WEST'S 'AMERICAN HISTORY AND GOVERNMENT' has a section: "Socialism: While the Labor Union has been appealing to skilled workers, Socialism has been making rapid converts among unskilled laborers on the streets and among students in the closet. To-day it is a force to be reckoned with in American life; and therefore it must be understood. The time has gone when ignorant critics could safely and contemptuously dispose of it by invective or by confounding it with either anarchy or communism. Modern socialism points out that a few capitalists practically control the means of producing wealth ("the machinery of production and transportation"). This, they argue, is the essential evil in industrial conditions. Their remedy is to have society as a whole step into the place of those few, taking over the ownership and management (1) of land, including, of course, mines, water power, and all right-of-way, (2) of transportation, and (3) of all machinery employed in producing wealth." West then enumerates lists of General Demands, Industrial Demands, and Political Demands of the Socialist Party. FitzGerald wrote that "The textbook that best describes economic conflicts in America remains the 1923 edition of Charles and Mary Beard's 'History of the United States'." "AND IN 1918 CARNEGIE ENDOWED A MEETING IN LONDON of the American Historical Association where an agreement was made to rewrite American history in the interests of social efficiency," wrote John Taylor Gatto in "The Underground History of American Education." Gatto: "On July 4, 1919, the London Times carried a long account reporting favorably on the propaganda hydra being built by agents of Carnegie in the United States...Carnegie's agenda was aimed first at mobilizing world opinion and then controlling it...The end of all this effort was...world government.... The same issue of the Times carried a signed article by Owen Wister, famous author of the best-selling novel, "The Virginian." Wister was then on the Carnegie payroll. He pulled no punches, informing the upscale British readership, "A movement to correct the schoolbooks of the United States has been started, and it will go on." IN 1934, THE AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION wrote the results of a Carnegie Corporation funded study called "Conclusions and Recommendations for the Social Studies". Professor Harold Laski, Fabian socialist, said of this report, "At bottom, and stripped of its carefully neutral phrases, the report is an educational program for a Socialist America." (see excerpts from this study in Charlotte Iserbyt's book, "The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America", page 24.) The framework for public social studies based on the study concluded that "Cumulative evidence supports the conclusion that, in the United States as in other countries, the age of individualism and laissez faire is closing and that a new age of collectivism is emerging." (Tyack, Lowe, and Hansot, "Public Schools in Hard Times".) GATTO WROTE THAT SOON AFTER A CARNEGIE CONFERENCE held on December 19, 1935 which committed attending organizations to contribute to a "nationwide radio campaign managed and coordinated from behind the scenes...to commit the United States to a policy of internationalism....Soon after this conference, almost every school in the United States was provided with full-size color maps of the world and with League of Nations literature extolling the virtues of globalism." (pg. 354.) THE PRESIDENT'S COMMISSION ON HIGHER EDUCATION in 1947 submitted its report to President Truman. The commission had been charged "with the task of defining the responsibilities of colleges and universities in American democracy and in international affairs." The commission concluded that "The American institutions of higher education...will have to help our own citizens as well as other peoples to move from the provincial and insular mind to the international mind...We must develop a deep sensitivity to the emotions, the hopes, and the needs of human beings everywhere and so come to accept, not merely in abstract terms but in concrete forms, the brotherhood and interdependence as well as the individuality of all men..." The commission urged that "the colleges and universities, the philanthropic foundations, and the Federal government" not neglect the funding of the social sciences. It said, "The task of colleges here is to make the transition from a curriculum centered almost exclusively on the American-West European tradition to one that embodies the intellectual experience of the whole of mankind....A major responsibility of higher education is to qualify youth and adults...for participation in a truly global society." THE CONGRESSIONAL RECORD of October 18, 1951 carried the remarks of Congressman John T. Wood of Idaho. He protested UNESCO's series of nine volumes titled "Toward World Understanding" which he said instructed kindergarten and elementary school teachers to prepare students to be loyal to a world government. He said, "Teachers are urged to suppress American history and American geography which might enhance pro-American sentiments which UNESCO wishes to sterilize....Logical and orderly teaching methods are also to be discarded if found to obstruct UNESCO's program for de-Americanizing the minds and hearts of little children." BEVERLY EAKMAN, author of "Cloning of the American Mind", wrote that the booklets were written by UNESCO, co-funded by the NEA and the Carnegie Corporation, and printed by Columbia University Press. (Rep. Wood had called Columbia "a well-known hotbed of British Fabianism.") Eakman wrote: "The teacher was to begin by eliminating any and all words, phrases, descriptions, pictures, classroom material or teaching methods of a sort causing his pupils to feel or express a particular love for, or loyalty to, the United States." "IN THIS FREE LAND" BY Charles M. Crowe, 1964, contains a discussion of a Communist spy named Elizabeth Bentley. Crowe wrote: "In appearing before a congressional committee she was asked why she turned to spying for the enemy against her own country. She was reminded that she was not an immigrant, not a non-Caucasian, not a member of a minority race or group, and that she did not grow up in the slums, underprivileged or discriminated against. She was reminded that she had been given every possible educational opportunity in a select private girls' school and Vassar College. Why had she turned against her country? She replied, "Well I don't know; I've often thought about it. But I am sure one of the factors was this: I can't remember all during my education hearing anybody stress or emphasize the good. I heard about the bad, the Jim Crow laws, the slums, the lack of housing or schools or health or whatever it might be...I can't remember anybody pointing out and emphasizing the good in the American system and especially this good, that under this system we can do something about the bad things and if we lose the system because we don't understand it, then we can't do anything about the bad things." THE FAR WEST LABORATORY FOR EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT, supported by the U.S. Office of Education and Department of H.E.W., issued a guide in 1968 called "Education of the Culturally Different: A Multi-Cultural Approach", a handbook for educators. The author of the study cited the general agreement "among the intellectual and governmental leadership of the nation" that "the major current target for educational change consists in upgrading the schooling of low-income and culturally different children." He wrote, "The argument for culturally heterogeneous schools is not totally dependent upon pedagogical needs... Majority group pupils are being cheated in our schools when they master only one language, when they learn about only one side of American history..." IN 1975 HENRY STEELE COMMAGER (of whom British Fabian publications approved, according to Rose Martin, and, as Francis FitzGerald noted, whose name was borne on many textbooks during the 1900s) wrote a U.N. Declaration of Interdependence. It was signed on 7/4/76 in Philadelphia and was funded by the Ford Foundation. Over 160 members of Congress signed this declaration. Recalls education reformer Joan Masters: "The Declaration of InterDependence was meant to be a Bicentennial "gift" to the nation as we celebrated 200 years of our independence. When it was read in Independence Hall in Philadelphia an elderly, white haired lady arose in the balcony and shouted down to the reader, "Traitor, traitor!" She was thereupon removed from that historic building by security guards and the reading continued. Federal Rep. Marjorie Holt of Maryland later entered an Extension of Remarks in the Congressional Record blasting the Commager Declaration, saying it was a "socialist" document and a disgrace to America. To my knowledge she was the only member of Congress to do so. If memory serves me right, in that same year, the NEA published a Bicentennial InterDependence program for use in the classrooms of America. Also in 1976, federal bill House Joint Resolution 606 came to the floor and was voted on in the House of Representatives. It would have convened an Atlantic Convention as a "first step" to a "federation" of the Atlantic nations, to include the United States, Canada, and the western European nations. After a bitter, nation-wide fight by patriots to stop its passage, it was voted down by only an eleven vote margin." IN 1980 THE ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION commissioned a report called "The Humanities in American Life" that urged "significant improvements in public education" and a "vision of language, literature, and history in the formation of citizens very different from what until then had prevailed in our schools" ("Going Public: Schooling for a Diverse Democracy", Judith Renyi, 1993). The author of this book on the study concluded that in order to reach poor and/or diverse students, the children must be trusted to "seek out meaning and to shape it anew for themselves" in new multicultural curricula specifically designed to "engage and empower our most impoverished students." 1980s: Eakman wrote of this period that "successive waves of anti-Western proselytizers like John Goodlad and James Becker worked to purge American schools of Western thought...The goal, sometimes stated outright, was to shatter the common frame of reference that had for generations sustained our way of life. The reasoning went that if children didn't grow up with such a body of commonly shared cultural knowledge, then they wouldn't know enough about it to value it, and therefore wouldn't miss it when it was gone...A concerted effort was begun to eradicate any commonly shared body of knowledge through the schools, and a concept known as "global education" was born. ON 1/15/87 AT STANFORD UNIVERSITY a "throng of 500 indignant students and faculty gathered near White Plaza to hear the Reverend Jesse Jackson." They repeatedly chanted, "Hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture's got to go!" (The Diversity Myth", Sacks & Thiel, 1995). In 1988, Stanford replaced the Western Culture program with a new requirement called "Cultures, Ideas, and Values" (CIV). KEITH WINDSCHUTTLE IN 'THE KILLING OF HISTORY" (1996) summarized some of Allan Bloom's conclusions from his 1987 book "The Closing of the American Mind" that "radical theory had captured the entire agenda about how we in the West study human society and how we understand human beings as individuals...Most young people today were taught to scorn the traditional values of Western culture-equality, freedom, democracy, human rights-as hollow rhetoric used to mask the self-interest of the wealthy and powerful...This teaching, Bloom argued, had bred a cynical, amoral, self-centered younger generation who lacked any sense of inherited wisdom from the past." A 1992 EDITION OF THE CALIFORNIA ED CODE specifies: "Each teacher shall endeavor to impress upon the minds of the pupils the principles of morality, truth, justice, patriotism, and a true comprehension of the rights, duties and dignity of American citizenship..." (section 44806). 1994 BROUGHT THE CONTROVERSIAL, ill-fated National History Standards developed at UCLA. Lynne Cheney noted in her 1995 book, "Telling the Truth": "Although the standards for U.S. history neglect to mention that George Washington was our first president or that James Madison was the father of the Constitution, they do manage to include a great deal about the Ku Klux Klan (which appears 17 times in the document), Senator Joe McCarthy and McCarthyism (cited 19 times), and the Great Depression (cited 25 times.)" 1996: Geneva Gay of the University of Washington said at a National Association for Multicultural Education (NAME) conference workshop that multiculturalist education demands the destruction of the American political and economic system. She urged educators to be cautious about revealing their goals to the public, however. IN A May 14, 1996 COMMENTARY on National Public Radio, Katherine Kersten said, "The teaching of history is undergoing a revolution in our schools...When the national history standards were released in 1994, they did little to provide a counter vision to this notion of history as a free-floating celebration of diversity...Few subjects are more relevant or empowering (than Western civilization) for members of these groups (women and racial minorities) than the evolution of democracy. Thanks to Western traditions of liberty and equality, women and people of color, like other Americans, enjoy freedom of speech and religion, habeas corpus, and trial by jury. The civil rights movement, which has championed the rights of both groups, is a uniquely Western phenomenon." SEE RECENT HISTORY TEXTBOOK REVIEWS at www.textbookleague.org ("More Fake "History" from Glencoe", "This Prentice Hall "History" Text Is Essentially a Propaganda Tract" and more) and www.TextBookReview.org. THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE. The E-Files |
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