Teaching Zinn: Part II
[Part I can be found here.]
Some people regard Zinn’s work as so eye-opening it hits them almost like a conversion experience. Many of these people turn out to be teachers, exposed to Zinn at some point during their training. Some were already onboard with the ideas, but some take on the zeal of a starry-eyed convert to a newly revealed truth, eager to pass it on to the young people in their charge.
You can find testimonials from teachers about the Zinn approach at this site. I copied some down almost a decade ago when I first wrote the draft of this post. I haven’t gone through them again to see if these particular ones are still there, but they were there in 2013.
Here are some excerpts. The first is from an education professor at the University of Nevada:
When I first started teaching in multicultural education in a teacher education program in the college/university setting, I realized quickly that much of the resistance I experienced from teacher education students to the multicultural paradigm was a function of the face that few, if any, really knew United States history – that is, they resisted the sociopolitics of multicultural education because they believed in a whitewashed version of United States history – in essence, that “America is and always has been a just nation.”
I decided that to get my students to engage with the multicultural education subject matter, I needed to start with a multicultural history lesson. Naturally, I turned to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.
Of course, reading this history changed my students’ lives in profound ways – while it was painful for most of them to have their image of the United States changed, for the most part, for the worse (to be compellingly confronted with the atrocities committed by the United States’ government and related power brokers in the past that have continuing impact today), it was also finally affirming for some of them to have progressive multicultural education as a place from which to build a different, better, truly socially just present and future for themselves and their students.
This next one is from a Special Ed teacher in Washington state:
I came to teaching in a round about fashion – wanting to change the status quo in the world, I wanted to do anything but be stuck in a small classroom in a small town somewhere, teaching just a few students. The environment seemed too small, the impact too limited. Then I read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.
When I came to this quote in the first chapter, I wanted to shout it from the rooftops, sing it to the choir and put it on a billboard – it simply struck me as being deeply true and it gave me insight into how the classroom could be the beginning of enormous change. “The historian’s distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interests, where any chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian means to or not) some kind of interest, whether economic or political or racial or national or sexual.” This quote spoke to the importance of getting another history, the people’s history, into the classroom.
From a social studies teacher in Oregon:
I first started teaching because I wanted students to get more viewpoints than the traditional white male version of history. A People’s History was a big part of that initial inspiration…On the one hand, I felt compelled by political circumstances and a certain sense of responsibility to present historical events “objectively” and dispassionately. On the other hand, I could see that such an approach would undersell the importance of ordinary people who heroically struggled against oppressive institutions like slavery, while giving equal moral weight to the slave owners themselves. Reading about Zinn’s own experiences as a teacher and activist during the Civil Rights era made me realize that it is cowardly to back away from controversial issues, or to present them “objectively” with two morally equivalent perspectives. As humans, we make judgments by our very nature, even when we think we are being even-handed. I learned from Zinn that it is far better to make our views public and sincerely invite students to question them than to create the illusion of unassailable “objectivity.”
From another Oregon teacher:
Zinn’s materials seem to be most commonly used by middle and high school students, but even elementary-aged kids benefit from his work. I spent last year as a student-teacher in a second grade classroom, and Zinn’s approach to history informed almost all of our social studies content. Our textbook and materials called North America the “New World” and portrayed the continent as an untouched, largely people-less expanse of land just ripe for European settlers. And, of course, there were Indians interacting with peaceful pilgrims, nary a conflict mentioned.
My mentor teacher and I expressed our concern with portraying the past in this fashion and talked about the violence, how native peoples were treated, and the way most early settlers thought about the natives. You could see their little minds wrestling with ideas, asking things like, “Why couldn’t they just share?” or, “It’s not nice to kill people. Why would they do that?” I knew it would have been a lot easier to dress up as Pilgrims and Indians and reenact the first Thanksgiving, but we’re all exposed to that narrative in our lives. When given the opportunity, even second graders have the capacity to think critically about our past and become active participants in understanding history from a variety of perspectives.
I was worried that there might be pushback from parents, administrators, or fellow teachers, but I had the courage to try out some of Zinn’s work in the classroom after reading the intro of A Young People’s History of the United States, particularly this quote: “It seems to me it is wrong to treat young readers as if they are not mature enough to look at their nation’s policies honestly. Yes, it’s a matter of being honest. Just as we must, as individuals, be honest about our own failures in order to correct them, it seems to me that we must do the same when evaluating our national policies.” Thank you, Howard, for all of your work and inspiration.
From a high school social studies teacher in Mississippi:
I immediately went out and bought his book and my life as a teacher, as an American, and as a human was changed forever. A year later I was meeting a friend from out of town at a small pub for a cocktail and as I waited I met two young youth ministers from one of the local churches. After introductions I starting talking about Zinn’s book and they looked at me and said, “You mean you actually spoke about Howard Zinn to public school kids in Mississippi!” I told them my kids are truth seekers and Howard Zinn has debunked so much of the trash our textbooks have that my little anarchistic 11th graders were enchanted with any time spent on fighting the man.
Remember, these testimonials were already out there by 2013. These teachers were not teaching Zinn as merely a different point of view, an additional one to be pondered by students who were already well-grounded in American history, the Federalist Papers, and the Constitution. They were teaching it as a cause that gave their own lives and careers new and deeper meaning – and as that last teacher wrote, his “little anarchistic 11th graders” were “enchanted” with it, even in Mississippi.
Currently I found the following at the Zinn Project site:
Tens of thousands of teachers, in every state in the United States, access people’s history lessons from the Zinn Education Project website. An average of 20 to 30 more sign up every day. They find classroom lessons (most are from Rethinking Schools) and support. They join a network of teachers committed to teaching outside the textbook. Below is an overview of engagement with the Zinn Education Project website, as of January 2022 with some more recent updates.
If you scroll down on that page, you have more testimonials under “Teachers Report Back”. You can also find a graph of the growth of the number of teachers registered for the Project: “from 4,000 in 2008 to almost 150,000 today.” There is also a map with the number of teachers in each state signed up for the lesson plans.
Of course, Zinn is hardly the only path to this sort of education nowadays. He’s almost quaint, really, compared to The 1619 Project and the various varieties of Critical Race Theory. But he’s still a big force, and getting even bigger all the time, and his work has borne much fruit over the years.
Naturally, I turned to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.
Naturally …
I wonder if the lesson the students learned was that creating a multicultural, multiracial, ethnically heterogenous society was a mistake, since one group would invariably try to and come to dominate the others.
That’s not a lesson I’d like them to learn, but how much worse is it than what they are actually learning?
Our textbook and materials called North America the “New World” and portrayed the continent as an untouched, largely people-less expanse of land just ripe for European settlers. And, of course, there were Indians interacting with peaceful pilgrims, nary a conflict mentioned.
That is horseshit. They either didn’t read the textbook they were supposed to teach or they are lying. Even 40 years ago when I was in grade school our textbooks included the conflicts, without absolving the European side. Many of my teachers of course didn’t really pay that much attention to or present what was in the textbook and many of my classmates didn’t actually read it. (I never had one social studies class make it past WWI, so I know not everything in the books was taught.) But it was in the book.
I realized quickly that much of the resistance I experienced from teacher education students to the multicultural paradigm was a function of the face that few, if any, really knew United States history…
Having never learned anything of course they were vulnerable to a selective recitation of facts carefully chosen for a narrative. This is why people believe in ancient aliens and whatnot, they know little history and so con artists who know some can fool them.
Michael Beschloss, Douglas Brinkley, John Meacham, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Howard Zinn = History for Dummies.
Try Thucydides kids.
“I came to teaching…..wanting to change the status quo in the world,”
Is this a red flag or what? Maybe she could have come into teaching wanting kids to be able to read, write and do math.
This is another piece of evidence in the file marked ‘shut down the teachers’ colleges’.
When I was in college the teacher education majors were notorious for being the dumbest kids on campus. We used to make jokes about them.
Zinn’s history highlights everything he considers bad and unfair. IMO, Zinn, and people like him, need to study world history more closely. There are few places on Earth that have not been conquered and occupied by invaders. Of course, most of those events are much less recent, and the memories are lost in the mists of time.
To take just one example, the British Isles. Prior to the Celts there was another group of people known for the bell-shaped pottery they used. Little is known of these people except that they once lived in the British Isles and were supplanted by the Celts.
The Roman invasion was the beginning of better-known history of the islands. From WIKI:
“Invasions of the British Isles have occurred throughout history. Various sovereign states within the territorial space that constitutes the British Isles have been invaded several times, including by the Romans, by the Germanic peoples, by the Vikings, by the Normans, by the French, and by the Dutch.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasions_of_the_British_Isles#Neolithic_transition
If you zeroed in on the Middle East, in the area of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers you would find a similar history of conquest and occupation down through time.
It’s only been in the 20th Century that conquest and settlement of other nations has become an unacceptable practice. However, Putin has not given it up, making him quite a throwback.
Slavery is another issue that was a normal practice from time immemorial, until t it was branded as immortal in the 1800s and faded as a widespread practice. In spite of that, there is slavery on a smaller scale taking place in various places today. China’s use of Uyghur forced labor being an example. Childre mining cobalt in the Cong is another. Yet Zinn and his true believers cast slavery as an exclusive sin of the U.S.
Human history has not been pretty. Fairness has been the exception. However, we have learned from recent history that attempts at “fairness,” labeled as Marxism/socialism have all failed to produce either fairness or prosperity. Since Zinn covers only U.S. history none of that would be covered.
The World is not fair. I learned that at an early age. My passion in high school was ski racing. I practiced long and hard. I was on my skis at every opportunity in the winter. I did calisthenics and endurance running in the school gym. Anything and everything to improve my skiing ability. Yet there was one skier from Steamboat Springs that I only beat twice over years of competition. He was just naturally better than me. Not only was he a talented skier, but he was also the nicest guy you ever met. Though we were fierce
competitors over the years we became good friends.
It wasn’t fair that he had more talent than me, but in later years I learned (From the book, “The Inner game of Tennis.”) that my efforts to beat him had pushed both of us to become better. Our competition made us both better. That’s what free enterprise does. It allows people to compete, and the competition helps them all to raise their games. Of course, competition requires effort, concentration, and a work ethic. Not everyone has the same talent and personality for competition. And that’s where we see how a meritocracy works. It’s not totally fair, but it produces, on average, a better standard of living for more people than any system yet devised by humans.
Mary Grabar is the author of Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America.
From Amazon:
IIRC, Zinn doesn’t bother with footnotes.
I don’t think I would mind Zinn being taught in schools as long it was somehow made less pivotal, de-emphasized and presented more realistically and with a constant grounding in fact-checking and context. I haven’t read much Zinn but if I were using it, I would present it in the context of: “…and here is a history book written by someone who intensely dislikes his country, but makes some effort to look fair….”. Sometimes I think Progressives are highly optimistic in their self-assessments of intelligence and probity, and jump straight to the conclusions at the first tickle of intellectual discovery.
Challenged in their view of American history, they swallowed whole Zinn’s propaganda without examining it for accuracy.
They did so because they wanted to believe it, allowing them to smugly look down their noses at those less ‘woke’.
Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” is deeply deceitful leftist propaganda.
Example; the “Massacre at Wounded Knee” was an atrocity by whites against Native Americans.
Many Native American tribes routinely committed massacres, “the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions. [My emphasis]
It’s not really a surprise that so many ‘teachers’ fell for it. In high school and college, I had a total of 4 outstanding teachers.
There’s a bit of truth to the old saying, those that can…do, those who can’t, teach.
Marxists Public Seminaries almost every one of them
IIRC, Zinn doesn’t bother with footnotes.
No, he does not. Most of his books are extended exercises in opinion journalism. His signature is the ‘bibliographic essay’ in the back where he gives you a precis of what he’s been reading lately. He was given the opportunity to rework his dissertation into a university press book. After that, he published little original historical work making use of primary sources or citation and bibliography according to spec. Two or three labor histories over a period of > 40 years, in re one of which he had two co-authors and was the third author listed. Note, he was a specialist in 20th century American history and his most prominent work was a biography of Fiorello LaGuardia. You wouldn’t cite Zinn as an authority on much of anything else.
If the day comes when we control all the state boards of education and all the local school boards, what then? Are we going to replace all the teachers? Somehow deprogram them all? Seems hopeless, doesn’t it?
“Massacre at Wounded Knee”
It reminds me of another massacre the feds were involved with, ~100 years later.
Both involved armed cults that refused to be disarmed. And in both cases they ended up being slaughtered by the feds after they killed a few feds. In both cases fed attempts to disarm them was the trigger.
All history is ruling-class narrative. Our present ruling class wants to delegitimize the history that obtained up until FDR and the glorious New Deal.
Now, my narrative says that the educated ruling class we enjoy today is the most inept and unjust ruling class ever. It screwed the working class with the welfare state, it screwed blacks with the Great Society, and now it is screwing the middle class with its war on climate change and systemic racism.
For some reason, they don’t teach that in the schools. I wonder why?
bof – For what it is worth, I’m for eliminating public education entirely. Then the out of work teachers can learn to code or apply for jobs at homeschooling pods where the parents screen them directly and they can be quickly replaced if they managed to get their Marxist BS past the employment screen.
For some reason, they don’t teach that in the schools. I wonder why?
Don’t know why. Do know what you said is largely nonsense, so it should not be taught.
The inimitable Victor David Hanson detail exactly how and why our civilization is sliding into decadence and decline.
See https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/28/the-thinnest-veneer-of-civilization/
You want to see a prime example of the decadence and decline?
Feast your eyes on this–
See https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/09/lizzo-plays-james-madisons-flute-loaned-library-congress-b-tch-just-twerked-played-james-madisons-flute/
All of those quoted people sound so sincere, so well-intentioned.
And yet — so ignorant (yes, I have read some of Mary Grabar’s book, but I knew from reading Zinn’s first chapter that he was vastly ignorant or malicious or both).
A fine platitude from Zinn, and very true — but he was not then, and apparently was not later (he died January 27, 2010), honest about either American history or his own failures.
And the Democrats who love him so much are absolutely dishonest about evaluating our national policies (they don’t evaluate anything in the usual meaning, they just emote and posture).
Frankly, I’m surprised Amazon sells it.
I think they got slapped down not long ago for deep-sixing conservative works, and discovered that dissing half the country can lose a lot of customers.
https://nypost.com/2021/03/04/amazon-pulls-justice-clarence-thomas-doc-as-censorship-of-conservative-content-continues/
Or maybe they are just being more surreptitious about their proclivities.
This is what they were doing in 2012; don’t know if they’ve changed since then or are just hiding their procedures better.
https://selfpublishingadvice.org/amazon-censoring-indie-author-reviews/
But then, following your own procedures can get dicey when they’re duplicitous to start with.
https://babylonbee.com/news/amazoncom-thrown-off-aws-for-selling-trumps-art-of-the-deal
This is tangentially related – about history education and redefining terms. It’s long but very informative.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdY_IMZH2Ko
Looking around to see what Amazon is doing now generated a lot of hits, but this one rivaled the Babylon Bee story.
https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2020/06/22/amazon-censors-killing-free-speech-documentary-about-censorship/
It’s getting hard to parody real life.
https://www.dailywire.com/news/a-brief-history-of-book-burning-amazon-censorship-and-canceled-dr-seuss-are-simply-the-latest-high-tech-examples
2021-03
This article is more in-depth than most stories I found, which are usually focused on the political books most recently pulled (see the above posts), or the authors’ own niche interests (such as Holocaust denial and white identitarianism), and not on the censoring process itself.
One of the stealth techniques for suppressing something without actually banning it from the Amazon website is to prohibit ads or promotions.
https://www.deseret.com/indepth/2021/3/8/22308119/bill-clinton-helped-create-conservative-publishing-where-headed-josh-hawley-regnery-amazon-google
“Is Amazon Allowed to Censor Conservative Books?
From J.K. Rowling to Josh Hawley, writers with unpopular beliefs are under siege. Now Amazon is on the battlefield
Publishers once wanted conservative books because they make money, but they’re pulling back at the first whiff of controversy”
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I had a best friend who finally stopped talking to me over the whole barge of social and political issues, known him since before kindergarten. His dad was a high school science teacher, and actually gave me good career advice in high school which I promptly disregarded. The dad was always in the forefront of lefto causes. I have to wonder if the guy was actually a Communist. At age 98, it doesn’t matter.
Thanks to JJ for his comment above. I have saved it and printed it for my grandchildren to read in order for them to have some background to counter the pap they are being taught today in our lousy public schools.