Over at Chinfluenza, I have been enticed and am ordering EIght Eurocentric Historians off Link+ as a result.  Reading over at Musings for peace I was equally interested when I found that one woman was fired for allegedly indoctrininating her students with afrocentrism because of her use of The Autobiography of Malcolm X.  You can hear her side of the story at Democracy Now.  With fevers running high because of the passage of prop 8 and other controversial bills, there are plenty of ways to get fired in California.  Having said this, I do think it is valuable to try and find ways to unite diverse views of history, but I am worried when I see teachers being fired over such differences.  I think there is more to the world than a Eurocentric worldview, and is why I push so hard for foreign language skills to become a bigger and more rigorous part of the education system.

I think that diversity, however, is the least of a textbook’s problems.  Textbooks are so watered down and often bland.  I have suggested before that I think now may be the generation to simply do away with textbooks for primary and secondary sources.  Textbooks cost too much to update each year.