{"id":46995,"date":"2020-01-15T09:22:48","date_gmt":"2020-01-15T13:22:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/?p=46995"},"modified":"2020-01-16T08:54:22","modified_gmt":"2020-01-16T12:54:22","slug":"fake-news-and-public-school-textbooks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2020\/01\/fake-news-and-public-school-textbooks.html","title":{"rendered":"Fake News and Public School Textbooks"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

There\u2019s been some recent discussion<\/a> about differences in American history textbooks from state to state.<\/p>\n

\n

Southern whites resisted Reconstruction, according to a McGraw-Hill textbook, because they \u201cdid not want African-Americans to have more rights.\u201d But the Texas edition offers an additional reason: Reforms cost money, and that meant higher taxes.<\/p>\n

Whole paragraphs on redlining and restrictive deeds appear only in the California editions of textbooks, partly as a result of different state standards. Texas\u2019 social studies guidelines do not mention housing discrimination at all.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

These differences ares so pervasive that one could almost argue that American young people are being taught completely different versions of U.S. history, depending on the state they live in.<\/p>\n

Given the attention this has received, I thought I\u2019d take a moment to note that this is not new. A century ago, national textbook publishers created two vastly different editions of their history textbooks, one for schools in the south, and one for schools in the north. Children in different regions of the country learned completely different\u2014and incompatible\u2014versions of what happened during and leading up to the Civil War.<\/p>\n

Opposition to the civil rights movement during the 1950s and 1960s was grounded in an alternative historical reality that was taught in public schools across the U.S. South<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The effort to reeducate the South, indeed the entire nation, by recasting the Civil War as the \u201cLost Cause\u201d was promoted by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), as James M. McPherson describes in an essay in The Memory Of The Civil War in American Culture<\/em><\/a>. Soon after the group organized in 1895, it created children\u2019s auxiliaries called Children of the Confederacy with the purpose of \u201ctelling the Truth to children\u201d \u2014 in other words, making sure that children were presented with a version of the still-recent war that placed it within the context of southern romanticism. As McPherson notes, \u201cChildren were ubiquitous at parades, rallies, and reunions of the UDC,\u201d and those of its counterpart organization the United Confederate Veterans (UCV).<\/p>\n

\u2026 children were provided opportunities to write and recite original poems and speeches that expressed pride in their Confederate heritage. These efforts were aimed to combat what southern leaders viewed as the false history that their children had learned from textbooks overwhelmingly authored and published by northerners. Southerners complained that these texts indoctrinated southern children in a nationalism born out of a Union victory, which relegated their region to a place of dishonor in the national narrative.<\/p>\n

During the first decade of the 20th century, the UDC and UCV engaged in a full-scale onslaught against the textbook industry. Each organization had formed its own \u201cHistorical Committee,\u201d which, as McPherson notes, was commissioned to \u201cselect and designate such proper and truthful history of the United States, to be used in both public and private schools of the South,\u201d and to \u201cput the seal of their condemnation upon such as are not truthful histories.\u201d Hence, the committees focused almost entirely on censoring what was dubbed \u201clong-legged Yankee lies\u201d in textbooks that represented the North as noble defenders of the Union and the South as ignoble rebels.<\/p>\n

By 1910, the Historical Committees declared mission accomplished.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Students who used southern textbooks learned that the civil war was about states\u2019 rights; that slaves had been well treated, happy, and loyal; and that the real villain were the abolitionists who stirred up trouble where none existed. Violent white militias such as the ku klux klan were portrayed in these texts as saviors necessary to protect white southerners against aggression from newly freed blacks who had been corrupted and turned against southern whites\u2014their staunchest protectors\u2014by self-motivated northern \u201ccarpetbaggers.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, up was down and down was up: these textbooks created an alternative reality<\/a> and a false version of the past. National textbook publishers bowed to this reality as some sort of financial necessity, becoming complicit in the miseducation of generations of white southern children.<\/p>\n

The bottom line for national book publishers was they had decisions to make if they wanted to sell books to Southern schools. Go all in with Lost Cause dogma and be able to sell the book only in the South? Or have two versions of the same book \u2014 one with carefully worded, watered-down history for the South, and another one with historical facts for everyone else? The latter was often the choice.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We talk a lot about \u201cfake news\u201d today, and about media bubbles, and about people holding alternate versions of reality. In some sense, though, these bifurcated textbooks were the epitomization of just this phenomenon\u2014a phenomenon that, this example makes clear, is not in any sense new\u2014or without price<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I have a <\/b>Patreon<\/b><\/a>! Please support my writing!\u00a0<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We talk a lot about “fake news” today, and about media bubbles, and about people holding alternate versions of reality. In some sense, though, these bifurcated textbooks were the epitomization of just this phenomenon—a phenomenon that, this example makes clear, is not in any sense new—or without price.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Click through to read more!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":845,"featured_media":47001,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[183,208],"class_list":["post-46995","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-history","tag-race"],"yoast_head":"\nFake News and Public School Textbooks<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"These bifurcated textbooks were the epitomization of just this phenomenon---a phenomenon that was not without price.\u00a0\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2020\/01\/fake-news-and-public-school-textbooks.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Fake News and Public School Textbooks\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"These bifurcated textbooks were the epitomization of just this phenomenon---a phenomenon that was not without price.\u00a0\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2020\/01\/fake-news-and-public-school-textbooks.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Love, Joy, Feminism\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2020-01-15T13:22:48+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2020-01-16T12:54:22+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/166\/2020\/01\/old-books-436498_1920-2.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"768\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"512\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Libby Anne\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Libby Anne\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"4 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2020\/01\/fake-news-and-public-school-textbooks.html\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2020\/01\/fake-news-and-public-school-textbooks.html\",\"name\":\"Fake News and Public School Textbooks\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2020-01-15T13:22:48+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2020-01-16T12:54:22+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/#\/schema\/person\/fae465c1bbb5cbdf26c9e73bfd1b73d2\"},\"description\":\"These bifurcated textbooks were the epitomization of just this phenomenon---a phenomenon that was not without price.\u00a0\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2020\/01\/fake-news-and-public-school-textbooks.html#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2020\/01\/fake-news-and-public-school-textbooks.html\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2020\/01\/fake-news-and-public-school-textbooks.html#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Fake News and Public School Textbooks\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/\",\"name\":\"Love, Joy, Feminism\",\"description\":\"\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/#\/schema\/person\/fae465c1bbb5cbdf26c9e73bfd1b73d2\",\"name\":\"Libby Anne\",\"description\":\"Libby Anne grew up in a large evangelical homeschool family highly involved in the Christian Right. 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