Check your student’s textbooks. My daughter’s AP class is using it
Education Organization Says Well-Known AP History Book “The American Pageant” Has Over 300 Examples Of Liberal Bias dailycaller.com/2018/09/19/ap-…
Education Organization Says Well-Known AP History Book “The American Pageant” Has Over 300 Examples Of Liberal Bias dailycaller.com/2018/09/19/ap-…
An education organization claims there are more than 300 examples of liberal bias — from a partial presentation of abortion to critique of former President Ronald Reagan — in a well-known Advanced Placement (AP) history textbook.
“We have 300, 400 pages of them [bias, errors],” E&RI president and former Reagan administration member Dan Oliver says. “Every page has a problem.”
While College Board, which oversees the AP exams, does not require particular textbooks, it is up to the teacher to choose a textbook. Teachers submit a syllabus to College Board to approve based on a framework, but it does not require any specific textbooks.
“As a strongly biased textbook, it has distorted American history for three generations of students,” Folsom wrote on E&RI’s website.
The AP textbook “By The People” portrays conservatives as bigots, Trump as mentally unstable, and the Black Lives Matter movement as a reasonable response to a police force acting like an “occupying army” in a “mostly African-American town.”
“By the People” lays the groundwork for Jesse Jackson by presenting every leftist movement of the time in glowing, uncritical terms. Conservatives, on the other hand, are consistently portrayed as angry, unthinking reactionaries and vicious racists.
In the main text, for example, Fraser quotes gauzy, moderate-sounding rhetoric from the charter of the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and lengthy inspiring excerpts from President Obama’s second inaugural address.
When leftists go to extremes, Fraser always offers justifications: American napalm in Vietnam explains violent anti-war demonstrations; Black Panther radicalism is merely a response to police forces acting like “occupying armies” in the black community.
Conservatives, by contrast, lacking apparent justification for their actions, simply react in anger and fear. Fraser rarely provides reasons for conservatives’ views, and they’re mangled when he does.
Opposition to Clintoncare and Obamacare is said to be fueled by selfish insurance interests, not policy arguments. While leftists are presented via their own most inspiring rhetoric, conservatives’ actions are framed by quotes from their critics.
Again and again, Fraser portrays conservatives as heartless racists and sexists. He mischaracterizes the GOP’s “southern strategy,” and explains opposition to Hillary Clinton as the product of sexism.
Concerns about crime are dismissed as code for racial bigotry. Controversies over single motherhood and conservative stances on social issues are treated as simple heartlessness or antiquated religiosity, rather than concern over family decline.
On abortion, opponents are not in favor of the right to life but said to be “opposed to abortion rights.” For Fraser, there’s no such thing as illegal immigrants, only those who came to the United States “without official approval.”
How could a man who at least appears to be a committed socialist, who dismisses America as a fake democracy, and who despises conservatives, have been chosen by a leading publisher like Pearson to write a U.S. history textbook meant to be used by students of every political view?
