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mitch daniels
Arkansas Lawmaker Introduces Bill to Ban Howard Zinn From Classrooms
It states (pdf) that any "public school district or an open-enrollment public charter school shall not include in its curriculum or course materials for a class or program of study any book or other material" authored by Zinn from 1959 until 2010, the year in which he died.
The Zinn Education Project, which aims to "to introduce students to a more accurate, complex, and engaging understanding of United States history than is found in traditional textbooks and curricula," noted Thursday that educators in the state may have a very different take from Hendren: "To date, there are more than 250 teachers in Arkansas who have signed up to access people's history lessons from the Zinn Education Project website."
The project is also offering a free copy of Zinn's seminal A People's History of the United States to any Arkansas teacher who requests it:
At least one high school class in northern Arkansas is making its opposition to the legislation clear already:
Publisher Haymarket Books, meanwhile, tweeted in response to the news that people should read more of Zinn's works.
It's not first time in recent history the works of the legendary Zinn have been the target of suppression.
Emails unearthed by the Associated Press in 2013, for example, revealed that former Governor of Indiana Mitch Daniels sought to ban Zinn's works from that state's classrooms, and the Tucson, Arizona school district in 2012 banned A People's History from all classrooms.
Given the response in Indiana to the revelations of Daniel's censorship attempt, however, Hendren may also find his own Zinn-banning efforts backfire.
'Howard Zinn Read-In' Celebrates Power of 'Dangerous' Education
AP: Former Indiana Governor Sought to Ban Howard Zinn's Works From Classrooms
In one email to Tony Bennett, then Superintendent of Public Instruction, Daniels writes:
This terrible anti-American finally passed away. The obits and commentaries mentioned that his book "A People's History of the United States" is "the textbook of choice in high schools and colleges around the country." It is a truly execrable, anti-factual piece of disinformation that misstates American history on every page.
Can someone assure me that it is not in use anywhere in Indiana? If it is, how do we get rid of it before any more young people are force-fed a totally false version of our history?
In another, seeing that a professional development course for teachers included readings from Zinn, Daniels wrote, "This crap should not be accepted for any credit by the state."
In a statement posted Wednesday on the Purdue website, Daniels reacted to the AP story, writing in part:
In truth, my emails infringed on no one's academic freedom and proposed absolutely no censorship of any person or viewpoint. In fact, the question I asked on one day in 2010 had nothing to do with higher education at all. I merely wanted to make certain that Howard Zinn's textbook, which represents a falsified version of history, was not being foisted upon our young people in Indiana's public K-12 classrooms.
"As to the anti-American canard" Daniels used to describe the People's History author, John Tirman, executive director and principal research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for International Studies, told Inside Higher Ed:
I see this as the last refuge of a politician who is quite ignorant of the discourses in many quarters of American intellectual and activist life. Zinn often appealed to judge American actions by the principles of the founders and those who we all agree brought progress to the social and political freedoms and responsibilities we now take for granted. When U.S. political leaders fell short of adhering to those ideals, Zinn was powerfully and incisively critical, and very often right -- on Vietnam, race relations, women's empowerment, the Iraq War, etc. Daniels does not understand that a vibrant civil society has many voices, many perspectives. To be contrary to the old mainstream construction of history is not equivalent to being anti-American. That should be obvious, but to a politician who still seems to be campaigning for something, it never will be. His unsuitability to be Purdue's president is glaring."
And University of Illinois English professor Cary Nelson, who also served as president of the American Association of University Professors for six years, told AP, "It is astonishing and shocking that such a person is now the head of a major research university, making decisions about the curriculum, that one painfully suspects embodies the same ignorance and racism these comments embody."
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