Kerby Anderson

A recent educational report illustrates that our public schools are politically skewed. It concluded that the Marxist Howard Zinn’s book is used in a fourth (25%) of all American classrooms.

Educator Larry Sand explains that Zinn’s best-selling book, A People’s History of the United States, approaches history from a Marxist perspective. “Zinn maintained that the teaching of history should serve society in some way and that objectivity is impossible, and it is also undesirable.” Zinn even admitted that he wrote his book to create a revolution.

If you want to know more about Howard Zinn and his education project, you can follow the link to this commentary. Even better, you might want to obtain the book, Debunking Howard Zinn, written by Mary Grabar. I did an hour interview with her about the book a few years ago.

Larry Sand concludes that students may be becoming experts in Marxist dogma, but they aren’t learning U.S. history. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni conducted a national survey of college students. It tested them about their basic knowledge of American history and government and found that significant numbers of college students graduate without a basic grasp of the nation’s history and political system. He also cites other surveys that come to the same discouraging conclusion.

In many cases, foreigners who come to the U.S. to become citizens learn more about our history and governmental structure than young people who attend our public schools. Why not require high school students to pass the citizenship test? Recently, the governor of Iowa announced a bill that would require high school students to pass the citizenship test to graduate. If the bill passes, Iowa will become the 14th state to adopt such a measure.

Our schools aren’t teaching history, and what they do teach is often politically skewed.