James Monroe deserves a place in the history books, too. After all, he looked so fetching in a low-cut gown!
After hours of tireless research, I can report where I heard about the Marilyn Monroe / George Washington ratio. It wasn’t 60 Minutes, but ABC’s 20/20 in a report filed by Sam Donaldson on April 2, 1999. I don’t know the name of the book, but it’s supposed to be a high school history book that has about 6 lines about Washington and 6.5 pages about Marilyn Monroe. The interview was with self-appointed textbook police Mel and Norma Gabler, email address txtbkrevws@aol.com
ref. http://www.afaga.org/BN-Textbooks.htm
Thanks for the link.
But we still don’t know which textbook it is, or who the Gablers are. And 20/20 is hardly a trustworty source.
I still think that there has to be more to the story.
I knew I was wading into hot water when I got into this. Tomndeb, and astorian, you are both correct in pointing out that Washington did play a central role in the formation of the Constitution. I was thinking more of the construction of the document rather than its actual passage, which of course is more important.
I suppose I am a little bit guilty of endorsing the premise that in times of crisis, there is an enormous demand for heroic greatness that is always filled, no matter what the actual qualities of the chosen leader. At least, it would seem, in those endeavors which are successful enough to write about. The deeds, successes and failures of the Haile Selasses, Robert E. Lees, and George Washingtons of history receive far less attention than the stature they are accorded.
It is my contention that revolutionary situations always produce a great leader, whether or not that leader is truly great. If you want a very quick breakdown of how America was formed, one need look no farther than George Washington–he was at the very center of it. If you want to examine the mechanics of how and why America is the way it is, one needs to look to his contemporaries. I don’t think that diminishes the status Washington is rightly given at all; it simply widens the focus to include others who were highly instrumental in the formation of our nation.
Wait a minute. We had a war in Korea? I heard about this ‘Vietnam’ skirmish. But Korea? When was this?
No, seriously. I’m a freshman in college who, despite A’s in history, has NO knowledge of the Korean war.
But I know where George Washington lived, his wife’s name, what years he was President, an accurate accounting of his role in the Constitutional Congress, how he set the model for the presidency… I could go on for a while there.
I sold my soul to Satan for a dollar. I got it in the mail.
evilbeth writes:
> I don’t have an answer to the OP (sorry
> Wendall) but I would just like to say that
> my personal experience with junior high,
> high school and even college general
> American history textbooks is completely
> contrary to the one proposed by the OP.
Before someone quotes this in order to claim that I was the one saying that there is an American History textbook which doesn’t mention, let me repeat that I believe no such thing. I was looking for a rebuttal to someone else that said this. Sorry to get picky about this, since I don’t think you meant to say that, evilbeth, but unless I quash even the slightest hint that I would assert such a thing, someone is going to misinterpret your statement and misquote me.
Nothing to contribute OP-wise: I’ve no information regarding such a mis-balanced textbook, but just because I’ve never seen a purple cow doesn’t mean there ain’t one…
But as for the rapidly expanding tangent regarding ‘what we learned in American History’: speaking as someone who studied to be a History teacher for a while, every teacher has a lot of latitude regarding what they teach. There are specific ‘items’ that must be covered, but as there aren’t any standardized tests to meet with (as there are in English and math), it’s completely up to the teacher as to how intently to cover any of those points. End result- the student walk out of the class with very detailed knowledge of some parts of AH, with very sketchy (if any) knowledge of the rest, all dependent upon the teacher’s personal passions, his/her own understanding of the events, and whatever time constraints he/she faces (“Well, we’ve just finished WW2 and there’s only three days left in the semester, so we’ll just whiz-bang straight through everything afterwards.”)
After my high-school AH class, I had deep knowledge of the Cold War, especially Vietnam and JFK’s assassination (my teacher actually showed us the Zapruder film!), but if you mentioned ‘Shiloh’ or ‘Antietam’ to me, I would have just stared blankly at you.
JMCJ
Give to Radiskull!
Hell, my HS US History class entirely skipped over the War of 1812. Slavery was covered in depth, however. Of course, that was just because my teacher was an idiot, not because of the curriculum. I swear I knew more about history than this guy, not that it really mattered, since all we did was discuss current events.
Mel and Norma Gabler are right-wing critics of modern education. On their website they claim, “We review public school textbooks from a conservative, Christian perspective.” Their website is http://www.textbookreviews.org/ . They are also the primary source for the 20/20 piece, as they come out with a list of factual errors each year.
There is one test that a fair amount of people are taught to…the US History Advanced Placement test. In my Junior year of high school the usual AP teacher (who taught real history and not just names and dates…he made people who wanted to prep for the narrow minded AP test study in after-school workshops) left and we got stuck with a teacher that told us about nothing but elections and wars. One of the books we used actually refered to native americans as “savages”! We spent the four weeks of school left after the AP test on the twentieth century. I came out not having learned a thing, but I am sure that right wing education critics would have approved of him. Anyway…he got sick of teaching in a poor racially diverse school and took a job at a rich white school the next year. The teacher who replaced him used a variety of texts with different viewpoints, includeing the People’s History of the United States (a rather liberal look at history). How I wish I was in that class! I guess what I am doing is confirming that there is a lot of room for teachers to use their own teaching style, but some things (like AP tests) limit it.
I received this e-mail from someone who works with the people who were interviewed on 20/20 in answer to a request I sent for information.
"The book you are discussing is a fifth grade text, Search for Freedom:
America and Its People by William Jay Jacobs, published by The Macmillan
Company, and copyrighted in 1973 by Benziger, Inc. Our organization reviewed
it when it was submitted for Texas adoption, but Texas rejected the book.
"Pages 384-390 covered Marilyn Monroe (about 39 lines per page). She was also
mentioned on p. 348 , 4 lines. The coverage included: Her childhood, time
in an orphanage, boys noticing how pretty she was, married at 16, worked as a
model, how she got into the movies and became a star, her marriages, her
unhappiness, her dog, her death from sleeping pills. One of the pupil
questions was “What problems did Marilyn have in her marriage to Arthur
Miller? What did she seem to enjoy most about being his wife?”
"In the same book, George Washington is mentioned briefly on the following
pages:
p. 14, a four-line question – “… Was Washington a shaper of events or was
he shaped by them?”
p. 18, about one line – “Who built America? … George Washington …”
p. 82, four lines – “What the colonists did have was a great leader –
George Washington … General Washington trapped a large British army at
Yorktown.”
p. 85, one line – “George Washington was elected the first president.”
p. 107, ten lines – “George Washington was elected its first president. He
chose as secretary of the treasury his former assistant in the Revolutionary
War … General Washington treated Hamilton more like a son … Yet when
Washington died, in 1799, Hamilton said only that the general had been ‘very
useful’ to him. …”
p. 108, one line – “… the twelve years that George Washington and John
Adams were presidents of the United States.”
"I have the book in front of me as I write this.
"Hope this helps,
"Judy Frey
"Staff member
"the MEL GABLERs
"Educational Research Analysts
“Longview, Texas”
Apparently the book really does exist. And from the title, it appears as if it was intended to be a general American-history textbook, and not specific to the history of women, or the history of the entertainment industry.
Work is the curse of the drinking classes. (Oscar Wilde)
The Marilyn Monroe book may just be an Urban Legend after all. When I searched in the Library of Congress catalog, I could not find the title and author I was given (“Search for Freedom: America and its people” by William Jay Jacobs). There are 37 books by this author (all of them about hisotry), but this title isn’t among them. The title isn’t at Amazon either.
So an obscure, never-adopted (at least in Texas) textbook from 1973 gives more space to Marilyn than to Georgy, is that what we’ve figured out? (And copies of it are very hard to find, which implies that it was never printed in great numbers.)
Look like a bad book that was hardly used to me. (And I do, as always, revel in the ability of the massed Teeming Millions to ferret out any shred of evidence, no matter how small and silly.)
I’m your only friend
I’m not your only friend
But I’m a little glowing friend
But really I’m not actually your friend
But I am
The annoying thing is that Mel Gabler has made his whole career by mentioning this book whenever someone asks him why his group lobbies state boards of education. What his group has been raising money on for years is the claim that unless they are there to scream at the board every single time they vote on books, books like this one (which never got adopted and went out of print 27 years ago) will be adopted by the board.
You’re probably wondering why I revived a five-year-old thread. Well, a columnist in USA Today revived this story about the history book mentioning Monroe a lot but Washington little. (It’s on page 13A on March 15th, in the column by Kathleen Parker.) I’ve written a letter to the editor about why this story is deceptive, using the facts discovered in this thread.
Well, Wendell, I asked the nearest kid, a tenth grader of my acquaintance about how much his text books in elementary and high school mentioned about George Washington.
He said, “Who?” :rolleyes: :b
So good to know that children are taught te essentials! 
Tris
So did you ask this kid what his history books did cover? Is this really a matter of history books not mentioning Washington, or is it a matter of someone determined to forget everything he ever learned in school? Were all those people who seem to have never learned anything about any subject who appear in the “Jaywalking” interviews really not taught anything, or have they just decided to forget everything from school?
My own experience of history in school is this: Teachers planned their time poorly, so that we rushed through WW II in two weeks. We never learned who Joe McCarthy was. The Korean War took about half an hour. I’m still not clear on what it was about, or why we still have troops there. I popped out of high school in 1967, ignorant of the things that had shaped my parents’ lives.
The Gablers are prominent in US education. They terrify the school authorities in Texas, a very big state. School book publishers have to make money, and they can’t afford to offer a Texas edition and a rest-of-the-US edition, so the whole country uses the Gabler editions.