LYING TEXTBOOKS

Suzanne Fields summarizes a few of the deceptions in America's current school textbooks:

"Politically correct simplicity describes "Native Americans" as living in harmony with both nature and human nature, with no recognition that Indians, like the rest of us, are subject to human frailty and prejudice. Francis Parkman, the historian who describes the pleasure Iroquois took in torturing the Hurons, is anathema, and gone with the Mohicans.

The lens for understanding the unique American vision focuses on the African-American freedom struggles that "helped open the door for all minorities and women." In one text on the Enlightenment, Mary Wollstonecraft, an 18th century feminist, is featured more prominently than Voltaire, a dominating figure for the ages.

Textbook publishers plead that they are at the mercy of state and local adoption procedures, but this is a dodge. They rely on "standards committees" and focus groups to package their ideas. These groups, made up of men and women raised in an image-centered culture, dismiss "content-heavy, information-loaded, and fact-based" materials as too difficult for the kids to absorb. Instead they cater to short attention spans and purvey visuals that turn history into "edutainment."

In varying degrees, world history texts make it impossible for students to discriminate between the brutality of antidemocratic countries like China and Cuba and the democracies, or to understand the conflicts faced by nations determined to preserve freedom.

"World peace" has become a chimera and there is little recognition of the contempt in which the truly democratic nations are held by the educated elites, so called. By failing to understand what's worth defending, we can't understand the peril around us. Woe is we."