Dozens of errors cited in Virginia textbook

[alp227]

Source: CNN

(CNN) -- A panel of historians has found an "appalling" number of factual errors in a new fourth-grade history textbook used in many Virginia school districts, one of the experts said.

The panelists vetted the book "Our Virginia: Past and Present" at the state's request, after it drew national scrutiny for its controversial assertion that during the Civil War, units of black soldiers fought on the Confederate side.

Among the mistakes noted by the three reviewers:

• The War of Independence began in 1775, not 1776.

• George Washington did not preside over a Continental Congress in 1785, he presided over the Constitutional Convention in 1787.

• Eleven states joined the Confederacy, not 12.

• There wasn't a Battle of Richmond in the Civil War.

Read more: http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/12/30/virginia.textbook.errors/index.html

[Downwinder]

1. I guess thats what happens when you let Texas set the standards

for school books.

[valerief]

3. +1000

[Luciferous]

13. Yep.

[hootinholler]

17. Actually Virginia has its own standards

The books aren't to Texas specs, but written to Virginian specs.

-Hoot

[CreekDog]

24. there's a discussion on the whole CA vs. TX standards thing

even though this thing seems to be home grown idiocy, it sounds like textbooks are generally written not for each state but for two markets --much like autos and their emission systems.

[Le Taz Hot]

46. And if given a choice,

I'd go by CA Standards. They're much more comprehensive. If anyone's interested, you can look up state standards for any state:

http://www.educationworld.com/standards/state/toc/index.shtml

[jwirr]

2. One thing for sure would improve our schools. Stop buying textbooks

from Texas and Virginia. And any other state that wants to rewrite history.

[onenote]

5. haven't seen any evidence that Virginia wanted to "rewrite" history

THe evidence seems to suggest that they wanted to save money so they purchased cheap textbooks that were written by non-professionals. A panel of school teachers reviewed them, but not for specific fact-checking, but rather to see whether they met the SOL standards.

[benfranklin1776]

14. Amen to that.

Their extremist goal is to rewrite history entirely ala the old Soviet Union which deleted people from official history all the time. Witness eliminating any reference to Jefferson!

http://thinkprogress.org/2010/03/12/texas-education-board-cuts-thomas-jefferson-out-of-its-textbooks/

No way these bunch of right wing wackos should set the standards for history textbooks everywhere.

[Bo]

28. The Banana Republic of the United States ...lessons from CCCP

....how low can you go

[CreekDog]

4. A teacher friend told me there are basically two flavors of textbooks written in the USA

One to meet California standards the other to meet Texas standards.

The other states essentially get versions of either one.

I'm guessing the "slaves fought for the South" stuff is in the Texas versions. :eyes:

[onenote]

6. so a textbook specifically about Virginia history was written either to meet CA or TX standards?

Uhh..don't think so.

It was written for Virginia and it appears that the main "standard" it met was that it was cheap because it was written by a non-professional

[CreekDog]

11. Do you have trouble with the word "generally"?

my teacher friend (not in reference to THIS Virginia issue) said to me (a long time ago) that textbooks are *GENERALLY* written to conform to two criteria/goals/standards because they are so different.

obviously a textbook about Virginia history is not written for CA or TX but for VA.

but the section that says slaves fought for the confederacy is not a matter of VA history but of US history.

thanks for the waste of time. :eyes:

[Doremus]

12. I have heard that too. It's all about the bottom line. It costs less to have one or two versions.

I highly doubt there's a recent textbook anywhere written for a single state ... unless it was underwritten by a wealthy repuke benefactor.

[onenote]

16. so why haven't we heard about this same mistake appearing in other state's textbooks?

I'm not the one having trouble here.

[CreekDog]

19. we have heard about it in other places

Your lack of hearing about it notwithstanding.

[onenote]

25. you still don't know squat about the Virginia textbook market

Your assumptions to the contrary, textbooks used in Virginia, even those about US history, are not part of the national textbook market that is dominated by Texas and California. As the article in the Washington Post (which was the basis for the CNN story linked in the OP) explained:

"Five Ponds Press provides books mainly to the Virginia Department of Education. The department is required to find texts that meet the state's stringent Standards of Learning, which includes lists of themes that each textbook must cover. That disqualifies many books produced for the national textbook market.
"The creation of Standards of Learning requirements helped create niche markets for smaller publishers, including Five Ponds Press...Five Ponds Press gradually expanded to other subject areas , filling a growing portion of Virginia's $70 million-a-year textbook market. Many larger publishers employ professional historians, but all of the books written by Five Ponds Press have been written by Masoff, who is not a trained historian.

"School districts choose textbooks from a list approved by the state. Among the factors is price. The books by Five Ponds often are less expensive than those produced by larger publishers."

In short, your assumption that the problems with Virginia's textbooks are related to the fact that Texas and California play a dominant role in dictating the content of the national textbook market is misplaced since Virginia is a relatively unique, niche market that isn't served by the national textbook publishers.

[CreekDog]

38. a fair point

:hi:

[Name removed]

20. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[CreekDog]

21. they went if on me first

And yes you're right I didn't use that word, thought I did but its pretty obvious what was said when I described the two flavours of textbooks.

And that poster is simply wrong equating what they have not heard to not existing.

[TheEuclideanOne]

31. I want to party with you.

You are clearly getting the really good drugs. :)

[CreekDog]

39. well i wish...but it's the Smart Phone combined with the Swype application

a graffiti type text prediction app where you see the word you typed but it replaces it with one below that you don't notice.

so my posts with it certainly look drug induced.

[awoke_in_2003]

7. When a presidential candidate...

can say something like "is our children learning?" then you know it has all gone to pot.

[VeryLibGal]

8. Great another generation who is getting the wrong information.

It is frustrating enough that my own generation doesn't know history.

[SpiralHawk]

9. Republicon textbooks are total mindf*ck shit

as this proves. The Know-Nothing Republicons need to be kept away from anything having to do with textbooks, since they are Hell bent on spreading lies...

[tabasco]

47. Doubleplusgood brothers and sisters!

Ignorance is strength!

[leveymg]

10. The Confederates torched Richmond and fled before Union troops entered the city.

No final battle, just a fall.

[OswegoAtheist]

15. Only "dozens?"

That's better than average compared to some textbooks I've read.

Oswego "I'm looking at you, 'The American Pageant'" Atheist

[TheEuclideanOne]

18. It was probably not noticed before now because most Virginians don't make it to

the fourth grade.

Besides, the numbers are pretty close. 11 state, 12 states, who cares? They should just say "around a dozen states" and be done with it.

[bitchkitty]

42. What an assholish thing to say.

I'm not from Virginia, but on behalf of those who are, why don't you just slink away and lick your wounds in private? You're making an ass of yourself.

[zinnisking]

22. Elitist liberals are always superimposing facts and reality where they don't belong.

Leave the red states alone you bastards!

[rexcat]

27. Did someone forget to use the sarcasm emotion icon?

If not I might be concerned about your comments on this forum. By all means please clarify.

The sarcasm emotion icon looks like this :sarcasm:

[Demit]

29. LOL! I think the poster was being old school. Being sarcastic with words.

And expecting the reader to know that without having to hit him over the head with a little drippy picture.

[fascisthunter]

23. expect more of this shit

[NoPasaran]

26. Actually, there was a Battle of Richmond in the Civil War

But it took place in Kentucky. not Virginia.

[Art_from_Ark]

37. I don't know if I would recommend that site

since it started automatically uploading some software (ostensibly Java but who knows what it actually was) into my computer without my permission.

[alp227]

49. Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Richmond

Hatnote notes that Civil War-era battles in Richmond, Va. (not Ky.) were not named "Battle of Richmond".

[Art_from_Ark]

50. Very interesting reading about the Kentucky campaign

[Rex]

30. Guess they've been watching the history channel!

Sad.

[boppers]

32. They're currently showing "Ancient Aliens".

It's a show on the theme that people must have been so primitive that space aliens (and their technology) built their cities and monuments.

[intheflow]

33. That's some good history, there!

:eyes:

[progressoid]

35. They need to start using quotes around their name.

The "History" Channel.

[quakerboy]

34. All in all, this could be an awesome teaching tool

One of the most important lessons to develop a thinking person is that the textbook, the authority, is not always right. Hopefully the teachers saddled with these books will take the opportunity to teach that lesson, as I feel fairly certain that it is vastly more important than Virginia history.

[dogfacedboy]

36. Not to paint all Southerners with a broad brush, but

why does most of the crap like this, as well as much more insane "thought", originate in the South?

[carolinayellowdog]

40. because the truth hurts

Back when I took VA history in the 1960s, almost all slave owners were kind and good, HB Stowe started the Civil War with her troublemaking, slaves were generally satisfied with their lot... Revisionist propaganda that started immediately after defeat. I hope WV history books give a different view of slavery. Seems like McDonnell wanted a return to the good old days of "Cavalier Commonwealth."

Do some right-leaning Western states promote BS history about Indian Wars? I'd think for example that NM history books are a bit more multicultural than those on AZ.

[onenote]

41. Is California now part of the South?

There has been repeated controversy in California over the years about errors in textbooks.

And crazy is hardly limited to the South. Consider some of the leading purveyors of crazy today: Palin (Alaska); Bachmann (Minnesota); O'Donnell (CT); Beck (Washington and CT); Hannity (New York); Limbaugh (Missouri).

I bet if you look around, you can find some crazy in Illinois too.

[sofa king]

45. Well, actually....

If you have an interest strange biographical history, consider the story of how Virginian John Mosby, "The Gray Ghost," used to reenact the Civil War battles of Virginia with young http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_S_Patton">Georgie Patton, on the Patton Ranch... just outside of Los Angeles.

In the wake of the Civil War, a good part of the Virginia military aristocracy transplanted from the Valley of Virginia to California, and continued on their Virginia social life from there. And though separated by thousands of miles, Virginian-Californians went freely and often in both directions.

When Georgie Patton was old enough, he petitioned to be appointed to West Point, but there were no slots open for him that year. So he went for that one year to be a rat at the Virginia Military Institute, in Lexington, VA. I'm not sure if he had ever been there before, but when he stood before the tailor on his first day at VMI, the tailor simply looked at him and said, "you're a Patton, aren't you?" and when George said yes, the tailor waved him on. He still remembered the measurements of Patton's father, grandfather, uncle, and cousins, who had all stood before the same tailor going back generations. (Patton went on to buy an unusual number of uniforms, and spent most of his free time that year changing into freshly pressed uniforms so that he could never be docked for his appearance.)

Not only that, but those defeated Confederates went on to become prominent politicians in California, quickly married into the wealthiest families in the state, and found jobs for others, often as police officers--which might go a long way toward explaining the history of the LAPD's peculiarities, though that's probably quite a reach.

[sofa king]

43. Virginia gets it several ways.

First, even though we're a modest state, we have one of the world's largest and best-paid reporting staffs in the world living here (and reporting, usually, on Washington, DC). So when we finally get their attention, you everywhere else get to know about it.

This story appears to have its roots in a couple of articles published back in October, in Loudoun County, which adjoins Fairfax County, which is where so many of those reporters live. So it's a nowhere local story that got catapulted to national news by the fact that the "locals" happen to be national news reporters.

Second, it's a fourth-grade text book. Fourth grade is still that stage where they teach you horse poo like how Puritans and Indians were friends instead of how the Europeans were getting the Indians drunk, stealing their land, and leaving them to die in frigid swamps.

Third, some of the errors are really quite innocuous, particularly by comparison to the lies we teach our children anyway. There was no "battle" of Richmond, but there was a seige of it, it was certainly the geographic, political and military object of federal maneuvers in each year from 1862-1865. Richmond was battled for, over, on, in, and around, and there are a dozen skirmishes which could be named "the Battle of Richmond," were it not for the fact that there is already a Battle of Richmond, in Kentucky.

Fourth, the inciting error that Stonewall Jackson had two battalions of black troops is, in its own weird way, mostly true. In May, 1862, Jackson absorbed the command of Edward Johnson and with it the labor battalion of C.R. Mason, about 200-300 black laborers who became the bridge-builders of Jackson's army. They were variously called the "black pioneers," "Mason's engineers," and so on. They marched with the army, were subject to all its rules and regulations, and did their work in combat conditions, including under small-arms and artillery fire. Another, similar unit could have easily joined Jackson's command in the remaining year of his life.


Modern "pioneers" and "engineers" are combat troops, in addition to being builders. So it would be easy for someone slacking their way through a history book full of simplified crap for magical-thinking children to assume that Mason's laborers were combat troops. But they were much more likely to have been the same slaves that Mason offered to the Confederacy only months before.

Okay, so there you go, my lame opinion. But again, I underscore that the way we teach history to our children is so f$%^ed up anyway that the damage being pumped by the DC press is insignificant by comparison to the overall approach.

[NYC Liberal]

44. There's plenty of stupidity to go around up here in the north

It manifests itself in different ways, sure, but there's plenty everywhere.

[underpants]

48. I heard this reported on the local RW radio station - it was the "number" of slaves in the CSA

that was the problem not the fact that slaves/blacks did NOT fight for the Confederacy. They rewrote the story so as to not scare their listeners and perpetuate the lie.