Are your school's textbooks trustworthy? [Excerpts]
The Institute for Jewish & Community Research recently released a new book authored by Dr. Gary Tobin and Dennis Ybarra. The book, titled The Trouble with Textbooks: Distorting History and Religion, is a culmination of a five-year study of 28 history, geography, and social studies textbooks used in classrooms in all 50 states.
Co-author Dennis Ybarra … notes sections of history textbooks are "farmed" out to authors who are not experts on the subject.
"And what then happens is, if somebody is writing about the Middle East conflict for example, it's more than likely that they're not an expert in that area," Ybarra explains. "So they're going to pull from various resources, and we would really like experts in the field through historians to be writing those sections [and] not to be farmed out to these chop shops, you know, that are mills generating textbook content."
Through the five-year study, Ybarra and Tobin uncovered a plethora of factual inaccuracies as well as anti-Christian and anti-Judaism bias. One textbook even referred to Jesus as being a young Palestinian.
