California’s Soviet-style sanitization of its history textbooks, as reported on
FoxNews.com and in the Los Angeles Times, is the kind of tirade-inducing news
story that gets me all riled up:

[M]any California textbooks will no longer feature pictures of hot dogs, sodas, cakes, butter and other kinds of food that are not considered nutritious. Nor will the books contain any phrases judged to be sexist or politically insensitive.

The Founding Fathers, for instance, are now referred to as "The Framers," in an
apparent effort to make them sound less male-dominant. And there will be no more reading about Mount Rushmore…where the faces of four U.S. presidents are carved into stone, because it appears to offend some Native-American groups.

Not only is this practice censorial, idiotic and, in and of itself, offensive but it is completely antithetical to any real kind of historical education. Nothing is gained by reducing textbooks to antiseptic and euphemistic catechisms of modern-day, politically correct orthodoxy.

History, by its very conflict-ridden nature, is oftentimes controversial, frequently harsh, and always best when subject to free-thinking discourse. No ethnic or gender sub-group can or should emerge unscathed or immune from the sometimes unpleasant truths which accompany any objective review of human history.

As the opinionated FOX News article points out:

Many of the changes seem to represent a direct assault on historical accuracy. For example, the new guidelines dictate Native-Americans should not be depicted with long braids, in rural settings or on reservations. There are no suggestions on how they should be depicted, however.

How can any accurate history of Native-Americans not depict them in “rural
settings”?

How or why should anyone hope to make the founders of American democracy seem less “male-dominant”? They were all men and teaching children that fact in no way serves to discredit young women growing up today in the 21st century. Avoiding the historical truth does. We can refer to these men as “Sister Sledge” in our history books and it will not change the immutable fact of who they were. Every American child should know the basic facts about these men and part of that education is being able to properly identify them as “the Founding Fathers” (as well as, of course, “the Framers”). Once students know the facts, they will be free to form their own opinions.

And don’t even get me started about the anti-hot-dog policy.

The sort of nonsense advocated by these California "educators" is all too common in the academic community and is a disservice to free-thinking people of any background or ideology. It treats the contentious issues of history as land-mines to be tiptoed around and the facts as inconvenient obstacles to the pastel-shaded, politically correct past that exists only in the alternative universe of their minds. This mindset sees children primarily as delicate psyches at risk of being offended or corrupted rather than curious minds in need of honest education and thirsting for basic knowledge.

The most curious will, of course, always overcome the efforts of the small-minded to protect them from the search for truth. Why though must we make children face such an uphill battle to attain knowledge and even a basic understanding of those who came before them?