PC textbooks full of skewed history
California has tinkered with the past in a foolish attempt to make students feel good about themselves.
By Diane Ravitch,
DIANE RAVITCH is a historian of education at New York University, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of "The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn."May 16, 2006

TWENTY YEARS AGO, I was invited by then-State Superintendent of Public Instruction Bill Honig to join a committee to revise California's history curriculum. Over 18 months, we produced a document that added more time for the study of American and world history and called for the teaching of the dramatic controversies that make historical study engaging and honest.

Immediately, however, a wide variety of religious, racial and ethnic groups demanded changes in the document to recognize and honor their history. Blacks, Jews, Native Americans, conservative Christians, Arabs, atheists, Armenians, Poles and others lined up to complain at public hearings about references to their groups.

What made their complaints powerful is that California, unlike any other state, has mandated by law since 1976 that instructional materials used in the schools must provide positive portrayals of specified groups. the rest