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Communism for Kids: Teaching “A People’s History of the United States” to 10 Year Olds
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On December 20, 2012 @ 11:51 am In The Point | 24 Comments
10 year olds. That’s where we’re at now.
Howard Zinn is no longer just for washed up actors like Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. His Neo-Communist propaganda is being wedged deeper and deeper into the educational system, because teaching kids to hate America is the new education.
20 to 30 percent of students in my freshman composition classes say they have read Howard Zinn in high school. Students now have eNotes to explain Zinn. There is a teaching edition geared for college teachers, and at least one for high school teachers, especially those teaching Advanced Placement history. They assign his book in suburban Gwinnett County, Georgia, and in rural Hoschton, Georgia. I have a large file of syllabi for such AP history classes. Students who complete their college history requirements in high school do not escape Zinn.
Furthermore, an entire spin-off industry has developed for adapting Zinn’s version of history for the lower grades. Publisher Seven Stories claims that Zinn’s A Young People’s History, for ages 10 and up, is their best-selling backlist title. A plethora of lesson materials is offered to teachers through the Zinn Education Project.
At a Georgia State University College of Education-sponsored “teach-in” last February, I sat in on a workshop where students from area colleges of education learned strategies from teachers and education professors for using the Zinn version of history to teach elementary school students about Christopher Columbus’s “real” accomplishment–namely genocide.
Zinn’s version of history has been discredited by some historians on the left as well, like Michael Kazin, who said the book was suited to a “conspiracy monger’s Web site.” The late Eugene Genovese told me he refused to review the book when it first came out during his own Marxist days because it was nothing more than “incoherent left-wing sloganizing.
Zinn contends that the Constitution was devised simply to formalize “the inferior position of blacks, the exclusion of Indians from the new society, the establishment of supremacy for the rich and powerful in the new nation.”
If you want to understand where Obama Elections come from, this is a start. The educational system is headed into dangerously nightmarish territory.
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