The New York Times has an article by Dana Goldstein showing how textbooks get tailored in ways that reflect state politics. What is seemingly the same textbook turns out to be different depending on what state is buying it. The comparisons between California and Texas on a variety of subjects show how we end up with communication problems — because we’re not working from a common understanding of our own history or other subjects.
The textbooks cover the same sweeping story, from the brutality of slavery to the struggle for civil rights. The self-evident truths of the founding documents to the waves of immigration that reshaped the nation.
The books have the same publisher. They credit the same authors. But they are customized for students in different states, and their contents sometimes diverge in ways that reflect the nation’s deepest partisan divides.
Hundreds of differences — some subtle, others extensive — emerged in a New York Times analysis of eight commonly used American history textbooks in California and Texas, two of the nation’s largest markets.
If you wonder where division comes from in America, this article shows how one of the places where it happens is in the schools.
As someone who grew up in the Northeast, I found it interesting when visiting the LBJ Ranch. One of the exhibits is the one room schoolhouse he attended as a child. There are prominent pictures of George Washington — and Robert E. Lee. My schools featured Washington and Lincoln; a one-room schoolhouse museum down the road from me features some Civil War battles as well, celebrating the Union side of the affair. “As the twig is bent...”
There are some things that get varying coverage because of the age of the intended students. Some things are pretty intense for adults, let alone children. That’s not unreasonable. But if a subject never gets covered, or the coverage is slanted, you end up with a world view that can be flawed in some pretty serious ways. (One reason Howard Zinn wrote this book).
Read the article, and you can see how differently the same subjects get interpreted. Keep this in mind too:
Still, recent textbooks have come a long way from what was published in past decades. Both Texas and California volumes deal more bluntly with the cruelty of the slave trade, eschewing several myths that were common in textbooks for generations: that some slave owners treated enslaved people kindly and that African-Americans were better off enslaved than free. The books also devote more space to the women’s movement and balance the narrative of European immigration with stories of Latino and Asian immigrants.
Remember when listening to today’s political leaders, it has been a long time since they were in school — and many of them may have not moved on from what they learned then (if they learned anything.) Keep in mind too, that we now have dedicated miseducation institutions. Billionaires fund them and create entire news systems to spread ‘alternative facts’.
The simplest way to keep someone enslaved is to install their chains in their mind.
Saying he “Loves the poorly educated’ is about the only honest claim in this video. He loves them the way a snake oil salesman loves marks.