Sloppy Oversite Hurts the Teaching of U.S. History in Virginia

Talking Points Memo and the Washington Post covered a story today about how the elementary history textbook Our America had many errors in it and according to some of the reviewers should be removed immediately from students. Some of these issues involve African Americans fighting for the South during the civil war, the United States entered World War I in 1916, and the first Europeans to explore the continent wore full suits of armor. All of these items are untrue. One historian, Mary Miley Theobald quoted in the Washington Post,  "Any literate person could have opened that book and immediately found a mistake."

Now a question that needed to be asked is how did these textbooks get into the hands of Virginia school children? In Virginia all text books have to go through a set of standards called Standards of Learning. The Standards of Learning are a set of standards indented to give students a full academic experience. These standards are good I have read all of the Third Grade History and Social Science  Standards and United States History to 1865 and they are legitimate. The United States History to 1865 standards reads like a college syllabus. So we can conclude that the standards did not create the problem.

The main problem that occurred came from the elementary textbooks to fulfill the Third Grade History and Social Science Standards. As the Washington Post article points out that all elementary school books are reviewed by elementary school teachers before entering into the class room. With some of the worst errors such as African Americans fighting for the South should have been spotted by the review committee or someone in the Virginia Department of Education. I just read the Wikiapedia article on African Americans in the Civil War and their article stated African Americans did not fight for the South. Simple fact checking should have found that error. The Virginia Department of Education should have had a historian of some degree, a Graduate TA, RA, a Professor, or a member of the Virginia Historical Society, double check the books. They did not and now some Virginia schools are stuck with an inadequate textbook.

Now though we cannot place all the blame on the Virginia Department of Education or the elementary teachers that reviewed the book. The publisher should also have to take the blame Five Ponds Press out of Weston Conn. They are the ones who published the textbooks in question. There are many flaws in their production of the material. A historian did not write the textbooks a random author with no historical authority wrote them. The book was not vetted by an independent historian validating that the text was factual and properly covered the material. An independent historian should have reviewed the text for quality and accuracy. If that did happen, most of these mistakes would have been caught.
As a historian having the facts is a important part of understanding history. Without those false narratives can be created and dueling views of the world can be promoted.  These ideas can be taken to the extreme and create an alternate view  of reality and create hate or misunderstanding that can be used to move an agenda. When history is used to move an agenda, it is more like propaganda than history. It is important for all parties in the production of any historical textbooks to go through them like a fine comb to find all the inaccurate claims.  If everyone works hard together, we as a society can produce texts that we can be proud of and teach our children an accurate version of history.