Fifteen years ago, I helped write the guidelines for teaching history in California public schools. Those guidelines -- drafted by a committee of teachers and historians and approved by the state Board of Education -- won national praise for their insistence that students should learn the importance of democratic institutions, human rights and the rule of law.
Last year, while doing research for a book, I read two dozen leading textbooks in world and American history, including many of those used in California's schools, and I was surprised to find that the spread of democratic ideas is no longer a central theme.
Instead, the textbooks reflect the relativistic views that permeated higher education during the last decade: All cultures are equal; none is better than any other; we are not to judge other cultures' ways of life.
Most alarming was discovering that many of the books contain dangerous half-truths and distortions. They do not speak honestly about some of the world's most tyrannical regimes. Over and over, they depict the brutality and avariciousness of Europeans and white males in the United States, while presenting glorified portraits of other nations and cultures.
The textbooks go out of their way to sanitize the very practices in non-Western cultures that they rightly condemn in our society. For instance, every textbook acknowledges that the enslavement of Africans by the West was a great crime. However, when describing slavery in the Middle East or Africa, many claim that it was a path to upward career mobility or a chance to join a new family. Slavery is wrong in any time and place and should be recognized as such.
Today's history textbooks assert that women enjoyed exalted status in the past, particularly in non-Western societies. Women in ancient Egypt were said to be the equal of men. Women in ancient China and ancient Africa were powerful. In Native American societies, women controlled governing councils. Students are left to wonder whether the U.S. is the only place where women had to fight to win equal rights.
The textbooks are willing to criticize dictators whose regimes have fallen, but they tiptoe gently around the regimes that are still in power. Hitler and Stalin are properly shown as despots, but Mao Tse-tung and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini are not. Their regimes survive, so the textbook writers stretch to find the positive side of their rule or ignore their terrible misdeeds.
