It’s surprising that so few parents are concerned that some of Virginia 4th grade history teachers don’t appear to know much more about the subject than their students.
What appears to have been overlooked in the controversy over the error–filled 4th grade textbook “Our Virginia, Past and Present,” is a group of state–appointed history teachers supposedly examined the text before it was approved.
Ronald Heinemann, former history professor at Hampden–Sydney observed, “I absolutely could not believe the number of errors…How in the world did these books get approved?”
Easy. By a committee.
Virginia textbooks have to follow our home–grown Standards of Learning (SOL), which means major publishers — defined as companies with a main office not located in the owner’s basement, possessing its own printing presses and familiar with the term “fact checker” — don’t compete for Virginia’s business since our market is so small.
We’re a niche market buying books that cost niche to nothing.
When purchasing textbooks for the Commonwealth, price is the determining factor, which is why we are the largest customer of Five Ponds Press (Motto: Cheap! And No Wonder…).
Elementary school history teachers aren’t supposed to be giants in the field, but I think most parents expect teachers, particularly those evaluating textbooks, demonstrate enough interest in the subject to notice the book had more states in the Confederacy than existed in reality.
According to Charles Pyle, spokesman for the Virginia Department of Education, that would be expecting too much."Teachers are not reading textbooks front to back, and they're not in a position to identify the kinds of errors that historians could identify," he explained.
But why not? Aren’t they familiar with the material? What happened to the "dedicated, underpaid professionals" who care so much for the children's education in spite of cheap, penny–pinching parents?
Maybe the Richmond evaluators are of my generation, which has undergone a wrenching reappraisal of Civil War instruction. Originally our Civil War history consisted of an early attempt at SOLs called “The Lost Cause,” devised by Maj. Gen. Jubal Early CSA.
In Gen. Early’s curriculum the war was about "states rights" and tariffs. As for slaves — they were content, loved their masters, didn’t live from paycheck–to–paycheck like Yankee hirelings and avoided the crippling obesity that plagues modern–day ghetto dwellers.
It’s quite possible the committee was still coming to terms with the fact slavery was the cause of the war and that's how Delaware snuck into the Confederacy.
And to give credit where credit’s due, committee members did catch the howler where thousands of blacks fought for the Confederacy, which is a bit like claiming German Jews helped defend the Fatherland in World War II.
Besides, the Ed department’s committee wasn’t supposed to get bogged down in a bunch of factual nit–picking. Its job was to see if the book conformed to the broad themes of the current SOL curriculum. Which evidently does not include accuracy, either in Jubal Early’s time or ours.
Summing up the situation in the eduspeak currently popular in education schools: We don't want to teach a bunch of dry facts about the Civil War to our students. We want to teach them how to think about the Civil War. At the end of the year if a student knows who won and that Robert E. Lee was the 18th President of the United States, then they are good to go.
Besides, you get what you pay for and these books really are cheap. According to Ken Bassett, the Prince William County school district supervisor of social studies, “(Five Ponds) is willing to go to great lengths for our business. Their product is substantially less expensive than the committee's next highest-rated competitor - very appealing in these lean economic times.”
And Bassett intends to keep the trains running on time and the books in the classroom. Since the students enjoy all the pretty pictures, what’s not to like?
Fuzzy math, meet fuzzy history.
Finally, before we close this week, I cannot resist an observation on last week’s Mean Green Bandit or Green Mean Bandit. Take your pick. This kingpin of crime burst into a Manassas convenience store brandishing a six–foot long tree branch and demanded Miracle-Gro. Or maybe it was money; accounts differ.
Anyway the clerk, unable to find a pair of loppers, grabbed a ball–peen hammer. Fighting ensued and the robber’s bark was stronger than the clerk’s might, consequently he escaped with the money.
I can’t decide if this incident is an indication that gun control laws are finally having an impact on crime; or this robbery is due to yet another failure of our environmental policies.
