Kerby Anderson
Wilfred Reilly has written a book about how American history is taught today. It has the provocative title, Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me. In some ways, it can be seen as a response to the book by James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me. You can read his opinion column that provides a summary of his book.
What is his concern? “We often, bizarrely, hear the claim that American history is taught mostly from the political right — and that it presents our nation as bucolic. But, in fact, many of the best-selling social-science books of the past few decades focus on the idea that the ‘real’ history of the United States was a virtually unending bloodbath.”
Two of those books are Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and the New York Times best seller The 1619 Project. He adds that “the contemporary US national media and professors lean roughly 93 percent to the left, and this has been the case for some time. Within the secondary schools, two popular curricula currently in use come from the 1619 Project and Dr. Zinn himself.”
As I have said before, there are many dark chapters in American history. Those need to be taught, but not to the exclusion of the many positive aspects of our history. Students are often left with the impression that the US was the only country that had slavery. They don’t learn about how nations in Europe and North America set out to end the institution of slavery. They may learn about European colonialism, but not about Ottoman, Mongol, or Arab Muslim colonialism.
Wilfred Reilly’s book reminds us that if there is a bias in the nation’s textbooks, it is a leftwing bias against America.