Best of: Changing the Face of History
2010-04-04 · Guest: — · 48:53
Politicization of history textbooks and hidden taxes
Bob Zadek discusses the politicization of history textbooks in states like Texas and California, arguing that elected officials and ideologues are indoctrinating students rather than teaching critical thinking. He also explores the concept of “hidden taxes” and proposes a “Truth in Taxation” act to ensure citizens understand the true cost of government.
Topics: Textbook controversies, History education, Indoctrination, Texas State Board of Education, California education standards, Hidden taxes, Corporate tax, Truth in Taxation, Healthcare reform
Speakers: Bob Zadek
The Battle for History [00:00]
Bob Zadek: Who owns history? Who owns America? That’s a tough question, and the fight is being fought in California, in North Carolina, and in Texas for the ownership of history and the ownership of America. What’s this all about? Well, the battle is over textbooks. Both the weight of textbooks—believe it or not, California has regulations concerning how much a textbook can weigh; that’s not what we’re going to discuss today—but the battle is over the content of textbooks.
Now, we’re not going to talk about—I don’t care about math and reading and biology, although we could probably spend an hour on creationism, but that would be for me not of particular interest. But on the subject of American history, on the subject of critical thinking, on the subject of who and what is America, that gets me going. And the battle right now is to define what America is and what is our history.
If anybody thinks that history is a set of objective facts, you’re nuts. Yeah, there’s facts. There’s July 4th, 1776. There’s the Battle of Yorktown. There are facts in American history. But for the most part, the study of history involves interpretation. Not just reciting the facts; that tells the student nothing except a lot of cold, boring facts. It is the interpretation of those facts that define who we are. And intelligent grownups who study American history all of their lives will profoundly disagree on the interpretation. Every day, to my great intellectual pleasure, there are new books being published on the Founders, on Adams and Hamilton and Jefferson and the Revolution and the Constitution. Now, why are there new books being written? Are the facts continually changing? Well, of course not. But what is changing is what those facts mean. And scholars disagree.
The Texas Textbook Commission [02:31]
Bob Zadek: Well, if there is a disagreement on what history—what these facts mean, what the interpretation is, how can anybody or who is to decide which interpretation is the one to be taught? And just to show you how contentious this issue is, the Texas Textbook Commission—that’s my label, that may not be the precise label—the Texas Textbook Commission, which by the way is an elected position. So imagine running for office in Texas and saying, “I want to control the interpretation of history in Texas.” And you’re going to run for that position. What would be your campaign platform? “I’m going to change history to make it very Christian,” or “I’m going to change history to make it very Hispanic.” Is that the way you run for office? You run for office trying to sell to the voters your interpretation of history? Oh my god, it’s impossible to think about.
But we have in Texas an elected position called a Schoolbook Commissioner. And every decade, they get to rewrite history. And they’re rewriting history now in Texas. And this has made the media big time. And that’s what brought this issue to my attention because I started to ask myself, well, how is Texas going to decide what version of history, what interpretation will be taught to the students for the next decade? And lest you think this is not that important, we all have been reading—there’s been a lot in the media about the suicide bombers, the Islamic fundamentalist suicide bombers. And we ask ourselves, how could they get to be suicide bombers? Why would they want to not cherish their own lives? Well, the reason is the suicide bombers were captured in the intellectual sense by Islamic fundamentalists who indoctrinated them in schools and taught them a worldview from the time they were old enough to walk. So by the time they got to be 15 and 20 years old, they were lost because they were indoctrinated.
Indoctrination and Role Models [04:23]
Bob Zadek: So the skill or the importance of grabbing young children and putting ideas in their head for other purposes other than merely sharing knowledge is very important and it affects—it could affect the student forever. So in textbooks, they are building voters from scratch that are going to vote in 15 years. And are we going to allow somebody, some hairdresser or plumber who is going to run for office in Texas and say, “Elect me a textbook commissioner so I can further social goals”? But that’s what’s going to go on in Texas. And this is all pretty nuts.
To give you—now, it’s scary stuff. I read a quote by a guy named, who I don’t know of course, Don McLeroy, who’s a textbook schoolbook commissioner. And he’s very conservative, of course the conservatives have captured the textbook commission. Let me just read you one quote, and by the way, I am not making this up. Here’s what Commissioner Don McLeroy said, and he happened to be discussing evolution, but listen to what he said: quote, “Somebody’s got to stand up to experts,” close quote. Down with experts! Get experts out of the textbook writing business. We have no use for experts in writing textbooks. We want rookies, we want amateurs, we want hairdressers and plumbers and accountants to write history. Is that who—how Texas kids are going to be taught?
And it gets worse, or maybe just as bad. In Texas, the conservatives have captured the textbook writing commission. And so the progressives, the liberals are in a minority. And there was a Latino commissioner who was outvoted. And she was complaining to the media being outvoted. She said there should be many more Latinos as role models in the textbooks because Latino students need role models for their—get this—for their self-esteem. So now we’re going to write textbooks in order to build the self-esteem of the students. Not to teach them history, not to teach them what is America all about, to give them self-esteem. I suspect if she were in the voting control, she would rewrite history and Washington would become a Mexican. And therefore the Latinos would have all the self-esteem they want. Now, of course, you can’t massage history to capture the minds of students.
North Carolina and the Removal of History [07:16]
Bob Zadek: If you’re a high school graduate, or maybe even if you’re not, you probably have some smattering of information about the American Revolution, about the Declaration of Independence, about the Civil War, about the War of 1812. If you will be a graduate of the North Carolina school system, you will not know about this stuff. At least not if the North Carolina Chief Academic Officer, Rebecca—remember her name—Garland has her way. She is the quote “Chief Academic,” underline academic, “Officer.” And in her view, as part of the high school curriculum—get this, I’m not making it up—no history should be taught prior to 1877. That should be out of the high school curriculum. Yes, the Civil War? Uh-uh, didn’t happen. Writing the Constitution? Never happened. The Revolutionary War? Never happened, sorry kids, didn’t happen. You’re making it up. Didn’t happen. She doesn’t want American history to be taught prior to 1877 because, get this, her high school students can’t relate to it. They can’t relate to it. So history will stop with the iPod because they can relate to that. So anything prior to the iPod never existed. Welcome to the North Carolina Department of Education.
Removing Thomas Jefferson [08:11]
Bob Zadek: So that’s what’s going on in education. Educators, and perhaps that should be in quotes, are rewriting history. Now, getting back to Texas. To show you how insane this is getting—I can’t think of a different word, how insane this is getting. In Texas, the conservative Texas textbook writing commission has voted and has decided to excise Thomas Jefferson as a founding political philosopher. He is not to be listed as a founding political philosopher. All he did, of course, was write the Declaration of Independence, write the Virginia Declaration of Religious Freedom, was one of the great scholars of the revolutionary era, was the third president of the country, was the first Secretary of State, and he’s being written out of Texas history.
Now why? What did Jefferson do wrong? Well, Jefferson wrote a letter to a Baptist minister and in his letter he discussed the separation of church and state. He wrote a phrase which lives in history called “a wall of separation between church and state.” Now that was Jefferson’s interpretation of the Bill of Rights, and he was writing in a private correspondence to a Baptist minister. Well, the textbook commissioners have decided that Jefferson was not—did not sufficiently embrace the church. Therefore, we must excise him as a founding philosopher. Can you believe it? This is what Texas students will be taught. Jefferson just got written out. Talk about revisionism! Is this the way we want our students to be taught? By elected officials deciding what is history and what is not history.
Competing Historical Narratives [09:31]
Bob Zadek: Today’s New York Times had an interesting story about the Texas controversy. And it compared—there was a writer, he recently died, Howard Zinn. He’s a bit progressive, and he wrote a book called A People’s History of the United States. And in his book, he depicts the United States as oppressive, in which the privileged abuse the downtrodden. That was his philosophy. And he substantiated that viewpoint with lots of facts; it wouldn’t be very difficult. And then there was a book written by a guy named Larry Schweikart, who wrote A Patriot’s History of the US. And he describes the New Deal as a calamity that wrecked havoc on the American economy. And I should mention there’s a lot of debate these days as to whether the New Deal exacerbated the Depression or cured it. There’s just a debate. Both of those books with profoundly different points of view are bestsellers. And they’re not trying to revise history, they’re just putting a different spin on it.
So if you were a textbook publisher, would you just decide which philosophy was more consistent with your own worldview and adopt that philosophy as your textbook? How would you decide? Who should decide what the students are taught? Then you have the more classic, if I can use that phrase, historians like Daniel Boorstin or Gordon S. Wood, who I love to read. They describe America in a way that I get goosebumps when I read it. It’s just the America I like to think existed. The glorious writing of the Constitution, the battle of ideas, the founding of America. I get goosebumps when I read about it. Is that the view that tomorrow’s students are going to learn? Or are they going to be denied the view that I was taught to accept? Or am I wrong? How do we decide what is America? Who gets to decide that? And that will form the political parties and political philosophy that people adopt in their later life. So this is profoundly important. This is culture wars writ large.
California’s Political Correctness [10:31]
Bob Zadek: This is a big deal. Should textbook writing be left to elected officials or be left to historians? Now, to show you how politically intrusive this all gets. In California, California has adopted—now, I’m not making this up—the following standards for textbooks. “Founding Fathers” can’t appear anymore in textbooks. It’s got to be changed to “Framers.” “Founding Fathers” was too male. Now, you’re not going to believe this. In textbooks, California wants no reference to hot dogs, sodas, cake, and butter. You know why? They’re not nutritious. Can you imagine? What is this, Julia Child or American history? So in California, you can’t have any reference to a hot dog in a book on America. What are you going to do about “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”? Are you going to ban that from the airwaves because there’s a reference to a hot dog?
In California, no more reference to Mount Rushmore because it offends some Native Americans. Now also, you can’t have any more reference to a “snowman.” It’s too sexist. It’s got to be a “snowperson.” Also in California, you can’t have the word “yacht.” It’s too elitist. And “senior citizen”? Uh-uh, it’s demeaning. They’ve got to be quote “older person.” No more senior citizen. Well, “older person”? Older than who? Everybody is older than somebody else, so everybody is an older person. Everybody is a senior citizen. Also, you can’t have any more reference to “the devil” in California, although they haven’t found a substitute word yet. I found one; it’s Nancy Pelosi.
So what California is doing is California is surrendering accuracy for political correctness. And that’s happening in our state. We have profound censorship. We have the rewriting of history so that people’s feelings are stroked. Everybody ends up feeling good. They don’t know diddly about history, but they feel so good when they read the books. And it just gets worse and worse and worse. And this is what’s going on in our schools. So parents, turn off your radio, get your kids’ textbooks and start reading it. You will be appalled at what’s in the history books. And this is going on sort of below the line. We don’t know about it. But our students are being taught a distorted view of history based upon who happens to be in the electoral majority. Is this the way scholarship is to be done? This is outrageous.
A Solution: Multiple Points of View [12:41]
Bob Zadek: Who gets to own history? Who gets to own America? Are we going to leave it to elected officials who are going to run on a platform of “Elect me and I’ll eliminate Thomas Jefferson from the Texas textbooks”? Is that the way people are going to run for office and is that the way textbooks are going to be written? Is that what’s happening to knowledge in America right now? The politicization of these systems is just getting out of hand and we have to capture it back.
I have a solution. I will, when we come back, I will share with you my view on how to teach history so we raise voters and not ideologues. I would propose that when history is taught, and putting aside the facts and the dates of history, when history is taught and where there is an issue of interpretation—let’s take for example whether the Founders were religious and felt God was important or whether they were basically secular. Or the significance of many of the Founders owning slaves. The relationship between the Founding Fathers and how they saw women’s rights. All these issues. Instead of having the textbook merely recite them one way or the other, I would propose that on issues of interpretation, the textbooks present more than one point of view with an introduction something like: “Some historians believe that…” and present the conservative, if I can use that expression, point of view. “Other historians believe that…” and stop there.
The students will be given two points of view. And if the students are curious, if they can’t just internally identify with one point of view or the other, they will be invited to read further and decide for themselves—decide for themselves—which point of view they wish to adopt or some third point of view. Where you have areas of interpretation, invite the students to learn the facts and reach their own interpretation. That is far better than just having this battle so that the political party in control gets to indoctrinate. I vehemently oppose any indoctrination of students with any political point of view. It’s harmful to the students, it denies them the opportunity to think for themselves.
Diversity Quotas in Textbooks [13:46]
Bob Zadek: In short, what I envision is when the country, when the Constitution was written, when the American Revolutionary War was being fought, the colonists, the soon-to-be Americans, they weren’t committed to the concept of independence. They weren’t even thinking about how self-government was to happen. The war was fought and then there was a profound, years-long public debate over what exactly should be the founding principles. And it was debated, and it’s debated to this day on what those founding principles are. But the fact is there’s debate. And to indoctrinate students is to cut off all thought and to cut off all debate. It’s anti-intellectual, it’s anti-critical thinking. And that’s what’s happening in Texas and in California. The textbooks are being captured and our students are being indoctrinated. It is outrageous that we have this fight for the hearts and, more importantly, the minds of students and we try to instill in them one worldview or another. I say expose the students to multiple points of view where there’s something other than a fact and let the students decide for themselves.
Now, if you’re a parent, I’d be curious. Does that appeal to you? Does that offend you? Is that the way you want your students to be taught? Or do you want them to be fed a point of view, to be, if you will, indoctrinated? It is the indoctrination that I find so outrageous. California has such a complex and bureaucratic and politicized process of writing textbooks that there’s no attempt—there’s no attempt to invite thinking. It’s just the battle over what to tell the students, but never to invite thinking. There’s a leading educator, her name is Diane Ravitch. Very smart person, devoted her life to educational theory. It’s interesting, she was for many years in supportive of charter schools and vouchers and free choice in education, and she’s recently, to my dismay, changed her mind. But we’re not talking about charter schools today. But Diane Ravitch, in commenting on what’s going on in California and in textbook writing in general, she said, quote, “It’s outright censorship.” Quote, “It dums down our textbooks, makes them bland, far less interesting than anything children might see in the movies, even in G-rated movies or TV,” close quote.
So scholars, those that get listened to and those that have a public voice, are getting themselves quite worked up over the presentation of history, the indoctrination of an entire generation of American students in history, just like the madrassas and other cultures which use the schoolroom to indoctrinate, to capture the minds. We are doing it here in this country. One more statistic really offended me. McGraw-Hill, a leading publisher of textbooks, has issued its own guidelines for elementary and high school texts. Now, you’re not going to believe this. Listen to McGraw-Hill’s guidelines. In focusing on the illustrations and the pictures in a textbook, according to McGraw-Hill, 40% of the people pictured in the textbooks must be white, 30% Hispanic, 20% African American, 7% Asian, 3% Native American, and of that, 5% should be disabled and 5% should be over the age of 55. That’s the standards self-imposed by McGraw-Hill. So it doesn’t matter what the history is, the facts don’t matter. You must have 5% of all the pictures somebody over 55. Now, I suppose there’s going to be litigation and they’re going to have a picture of somebody who there’s—the courts will disagree on whether he looks 56 or 54. And if he looks 54, they blew their statistic and they have to recall the textbook and put a beard on the guy or something else to make him look older. Now, sure, I’m making light of it. But this is what grownups are doing. They are ignoring what the history is and designing textbooks to satisfy the political process.
Hidden Taxes and Corporate Pass-throughs [15:31]
Bob Zadek: One more thought before we go to break. Don’t worry about little Johnny busting his chops carrying textbooks to school. In California, if you write a textbook for somebody in grades one through four, the textbook can’t weigh more than three pounds. Now, if you’re writing a textbook for somebody in grades five through eight, you get four pounds of text. And nine through 12, when you’ve got big bovine students who are strong, the textbook can be five pounds. This is what’s happened to textbook writing in California. It’s outrageous.
Another issue that’s been in the press recently is which is one that I have always paid a lot of attention to and many in the mass media don’t, is the issue of hidden taxes. Hidden taxes are the manifestation of profound legislative cowardice. Nobody likes to be associated with higher taxes. Nobody, that is, in the legislature. So the problem is, how do they finance government without raising taxes? Well, they do so by raising taxes without raising taxes. What’s that all about? Well, if the legislature finds some way to sneak taxes on people without calling it a tax, they have raised tax dollars but they don’t get yelled at and they don’t get voted out of office.
For example, and just to give you one example which is really easy, which is everybody hates or everybody in the legislature seems to hate corporations. Now, a corporation is just an artifice, a legal artifice as a way to accumulate capital and carry on a business. Corporations are neither good nor bad. Corporations aren’t sinister, they’re just a legal entity. And they’re run for profit. And they hire workers and they buy goods and services and they pay rent and they move the economy’s ball down the court. But corporations are often preceded by the word “greedy.” Now, how can a corporation be greedy? Greed is a personal quality, a corporation is inanimate. If a corporation can be greedy, can it also be depressed? Can you have like, “Gee, Microsoft’s feeling a little depressed under the weather today, I wonder maybe Microsoft should go to see therapy.” Or can a corporation be insecure? Or is the only quality they can have is greed? Hmm, wonder about that.
Well, getting back to our greedy corporations. So the legislature, by taxing corporations, they are not taxing people and they can develop this populist groundswell: “Yeah, yeah, tax the corporations, tax the corporations, don’t tax me, tax the corporations.” Well, intellectually dishonest, pure sophistry. You can’t tax a corporation. Yes, you can make the corporation pay a tax, but the corporation is only a dispersing agent. They will pay the tax, they will either have less money to distribute to the owners, which is you and I, the stockholders, or they will have less money to pay in wages, or they will charge more for their product, or they will pay their suppliers less. In other words, the tax that corporations pay is a pure pass-through. You can’t tax a corporation, try though you might. So by the legislature taxing a corporation, they’re really taxing the workers, the suppliers, the landlords, the bondholders, or the stockholders. That’s who they’re taxing because only humans can pay taxes. There is no way on earth to compel anybody other than a human to pay tax. But by taxing a corporation, you’re taxing humans indirectly and you don’t get yelled at in the polls, you don’t get voted out of office, even though the tax will find its way as an individual cost.
Truth in Taxation [17:31]
Bob Zadek: Now, statistically, the burden of a corporate income tax will fall disproportionately on the lowest 20% of wage earners because they devote the highest percentage of their income to buying goods and services, buying commodities, food and clothing and shelter. And buried in the cost of everything they buy is the cost of the, among other things, the corporate income tax. So by taxing corporations more and more and more, the legislature is really taxing individuals more and more and more. But the individuals don’t see it on their tax return. They only see it when they buy milk and when they buy a car and when they buy clothing. So the legislature gets the classic free ride.
When you get a utility bill, there’s a zillion taxes in the utility bill. So your utility bill is high, you’re angry at PG&E, you’re angry at the phone company, but it’s not their fault. They’re merely passing through taxes the legislature has imposed. So there is this—and those taxes are borne disproportionately by the poorest people. It is a grossly inefficient and profoundly dishonest way to raise revenue. It’s dishonest because the legislature, although they are imposing the tax ultimately on people, they get to hide and they don’t get to be yelled at by the people who are paying it because the people don’t feel it. It’s profoundly dishonest. There is just this—the legislature has found a way to pass the cost from one person to another.
Take sales taxes. Now, sales tax is borne by us when we buy goods and services. But it’s buried in the cost when we give our credit card or pay cash. We don’t really feel it, it’s nickeled and dimed every day to us. But it’s a tax borne by humans. The Medicare bill or the health reform bill has bajillion taxes buried in it. It is really a tax bill disguised as a healthcare bill because there are so many taxes. But it’s all buried.
Truth in Taxation and Healthcare Reform [18:31]
Bob Zadek: I would propose a “Truth in Taxation” act just like we have “Truth in Lending” where lenders must disclose the full cost. When you borrow money on your home mortgage or when you borrow money from a bank or other consumer lender, that lender is required by federal law to tell you in bold type, prominently displayed, the total interest cost you are paying. So even if they label the cost as one or the other of many, many fees, all those fees get accumulated into one number called APR, annual percentage rate. And the legislature has said, and I agree, that a lender cannot bury a whole lot of fees, you must disclose the all-in cost of this loan is this amount of money. I say, good job, legislature, that’s the way to do it. But do the same thing in taxation.
And I’d be curious how you would feel if there were no taxes in society, no sales tax, no utility tax, no luxury tax, no to every tax imposed on consumers. And instead of that, there was only one tax, an income tax. And the only way government could raise money is through the income tax. Now, what would that do? We would now get one bill on our 1040 which would tell us, “Okay, Stevie, this is how much your government has cost you this year.” Not a whole lot of taxes where you don’t get to add up the number. Because no one out there could tell me how much is their total tax bill at all levels of government for the year. You have no idea. If there was Truth in Taxation, then Americans would know the federal government has cost me this amount of money, this percentage of my income. And there would be an outrage. Pitchforks and muskets out of the barn, storm the Bastille, because no American would feel they are getting equivalent value. So why can there be Truth in Lending? Why is that imposed upon lenders, but we have dishonesty in taxation? Because taxes are buried in so many other bills. We have a right to know how much our government has cost us. We have that right to know. So I implore the legislature, although of course they won’t do it, for Truth in Taxation. Give me a bill, tell me how much I am paying, and I will decide if you get to be reelected. That’s my proposal. No more hidden taxes.
Healthcare Reform and National Referendums [19:31]
Bob Zadek: Now, before we go, a parting thought on healthcare, which will probably be passed in the House of Representatives before the end of today. I would propose that the Democrats pass whatever healthcare bill they want with one caveat. What do you think about this? Whatever healthcare legislation is passed in the House, in the Senate, and signed by President Obama, it has one caveat. It cannot be effective unless it is ratified by the very next Congress. That will give Americans a chance to vote collectively, a national referendum on healthcare. If you like the bill, you’ll vote the one who supported it back into Congress. If you dislike the bill, you’ll vote them out and anti-healthcare reform legislature will be elected, the bill will fail. Why can’t Americans get to vote directly on something which is going to affect everybody in America profoundly for generations and generations and generations? I call for a national referendum on healthcare. We are a democracy, this is too important. We should get to vote on whether or not we like healthcare. Do not leave it up to the legislature. That’s my parting thought for today. See you all next week. This is Bob Zadek, host of the Bob Zadek Show. I’m here every Sunday from 12 to 1. We are Libertarian Talk Radio in the Bay Area and around the country. Thanks so much for listening. I’ll be with you next week.