A Disturbing Book Worth Reading

I recently read a book that deserves the widest possible readership: "The Trouble with Textbooks -- Distorting History and Religion," by Gary A. Tobin and Dennis R. Ybarra. I never have met or talked with either of these gentlemen, but I can't say enough good things about this book.

For all who believe that there is a fairly objective rendition of history that we are obliged to teach our children, this book reveals how shockingly far from that objective American education -- particularly in schools' textbooks -- has fallen. In their conclusion, the authors quote the great historian of Islam Bernard Lewis' observation concerning the willful bending of history:

"We live in a time when great efforts have been made, and continue to be made, to falsify the record of the past and to make history a tool of propaganda; when governments, religious movements, political parties, and sectional groups of every kind are busy rewriting history as they wish it to have been, as they would like their followers to believe that it was."

The founder of the Council on Islamic Education, the chief Islamic group for vetting textbooks in the United States, refers to his work as a

"bloodless revolution inside American junior high and high school classrooms."

He is, regrettably, right...

[examples, disturbing, Highly Recommended > ]

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