Indiana's Anti-Howard Zinn Witch-hunt

----- Original Message -----
From: "Carl Jarvis" <carjar82@gmail.com>
To: <blind-democracy@octothorp.org>
Sent: Monday, July 22, 2013 9:28 AM
Subject: Indiana's Anti-Howard Zinn Witch-hunt




Indiana's Anti-Howard Zinn Witch-hunt

By Bill Bigelow

July 19, 2013 "Information Clearing House - Howard Zinn, author of A
People's
History of the United States, one of the country's most widely read history
books, died on January 27, 2010. Shortly after, then-Governor of Indiana
Mitch Daniels got on his computer and fired off an email to the state's top
education officials: "This terrible anti-American academic has finally
passed away."

But Gov. Daniels, now president of Purdue University, was not content merely
to celebrate Howard Zinn's passing. He demanded that Zinn's work be hunted
down in Indiana schools and suppressed: "The obits and commentaries
mentioned his book 'A People's History of the United States' is the
'textbook of choice in high schools and colleges around the country.' It is
a truly execrable, anti-factual piece of disinformation that misstates
American history on every page. Can someone assure me that is not in use
anywhere in Indiana? If it is, how do we get rid of it before more young
people are force-fed a totally false version of our history?"

We know about Gov. Daniels' email tantrum thanks to the Associated Press,
which obtained the emails through a Freedom of Information Act request.

Scott Jenkins, Daniels' education advisor, wrote back quickly to tell the
governor that A People's History of the United States was used in a class
for prospective teachers on social movements at Indiana University.

Daniels fired back: "This crap should not be accepted for any credit by the
state. No student will be better taught because someone sat through this
session. Which board has jurisdiction over what counts and what doesn't?"

After more back and forth, Daniels approved a statewide "cleanup" of what
earns credit for professional development: "Go for it. Disqualify propaganda
and highlight (if there is any) the more useful offerings."

Daniels recently defended his attack on Zinn's work, telling the Associated
Press, "We must not falsely teach American history in our schools." In a
letter posted on his Purdue University webpage, Daniels claimed that, "the
question I asked on one day in 2010 had nothing to do with higher education
at all." Daniels should go back and read his own emails.

There are so many disturbing aspects to this story, it's hard to know where
to begin.

The first, of course, is Daniels' gleeful, mean-spirited reporting of Zinn's
death. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with Howard Zinn's career
knows that his great passions were racial equality and peace. Finding cause
for joy in the death of someone whose life was animated by confidence in
people's fundamental decency is shameful.

As someone who spent almost 30 years as a high school history teacher, I'm
amused by the impoverished pedagogical vision embedded in Daniels' emails
and subsequent defense. Daniels wants Zinn's A People's History of the
United States banned from the curriculum, so that the book is not
"force-fed" to students. Governor Daniels evidently assumes that the only
way one can teach history is to cram it down students' throats. To see some
alternative ways to engage students, Daniels might have a look at our
lessons at the Zinn Education Project, which use Zinn's People's History of
the United States in role plays, in critical reading activities, to generate
imaginative writing, and to search for the "silences" in students' own
textbooks.

Take for example the last textbook I was assigned as a teacher at a public
high school in Portland, Oregon, American Odyssey, published by
Glencoe/McGraw-Hill. In the book's one thousand pages, it includes exactly
two paragraphs on the U.S. war with Mexico-the war that led to Mexico
"ceding," in the polite language of school curricula, about half its country
to the United States. American Odyssey does not quote a single Mexican, a
single soldier, a single abolitionist, a single opponent of the war. Well,
in fact, the textbook doesn't quote anyone. As one of my students pointed
out when we read the book's dull passages in class, "It doesn't even view it
as a war. It's a situation."

This scant treatment of such an important event in U.S. and Mexican history
is one reason why teachers search out alternatives like A People's History
of the United States, which includes a full chapter on the conflict,
focusing especially on President Polk's hollow justifications for war, the
anti-war resistance, and the human impact of the war. Unlike the gray prose
of textbooks like American Odyssey, Zinn's chapter on the U.S. war with
Mexico-"We Take Nothing by Conquest, Thank God"-is filled with quotes from
soldiers and poets, surgeons and abolitionists, generals and journalists,
clergymen and presidents. Every passage reminds young people that war is
much more than a "situation."

"We must not falsely teach American history in our schools," said Daniels to
the Associated Press, implying that the true history is to be found in the
officially adopted textbooks. As the Zinn Education Project reveals
regularly in its If We Knew Our History column, the version of U.S. history
taught in the textbooks produced by giant corporations is anything but
"true." The corporate textbooks hide the breadth of U.S. military and
economic interventions throughout the world; they ignore the roots of
today's
environmental crises; they refuse to explore the origins of the vast wealth
inequality in the United States; and the textbooks neglect the role of
social movements throughout U.S. history, instead focusing on famous
individuals; thus, they fail to nurture an activist sensibility-a
recognition that if we want the world to be better, then it's up to us to
make it better.

This is a point Howard Zinn emphasized when he spoke to teachers at the 2008
National Council for the Social Studies conference in Houston-some of them
from Indiana!-not much more than a year before he died. Zinn said: "We've
never had our injustices rectified from the top, from the president or
Congress, or the Supreme Court, no matter what we learned in junior high
school about how we have three branches of government, and we have checks
and balances, and what a lovely system. No. The changes, important changes
that we've had in history, have not come from those three branches of
government. They have reacted to social movements."

Governor Daniels' advisers evidently found no evidence that Zinn's A
People's
History of the United States was in use in K-12 schools in Indiana. I guess
they didn't look hard enough. There are more than 300 Indiana teachers
registered at the Zinn Education Project to access people's history
curriculum materials to "teach outside the textbook." And these are only the
teachers who have formally registered at the site; many more share people's
history-inspired lessons.

And at the Zinn Education Project we've heard all week long from Indiana
teachers, professors, and parents who have committed themselves to work
against censorship in K-12 schools. Their defiance is reminiscent of
Indiana's
Green Feather Movement that challenged the McCarthy-era attempt to ban Robin
Hood from the elementary school curriculum in 1954. What began as the
anonymous posting of green feathers on bulletin boards by a few students at
Indiana University spread to campuses across the country. As Howard Zinn
wrote at the end of his autobiography, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving
Train, "If we remember those times and places-and there are so many-where
people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at
least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different
direction."

Bill Bigelow taught high school social studies in Portland, Ore. for almost
30 years. He is the curriculum editor of Rethinking Schools and the
co-director of the Zinn Education Project. This project offers free
materials to teach people's history and an "If We Knew Our History" article
series. Bigelow is author or co-editor of numerous books, including A
People's
History for the Classroom and The Line Between Us: Teaching About the Border
and Mexican Immigration, and a contributor to Teaching About the War




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