Irredeemable Zinn: Howard Zinn’s miseducation of America

America turns 250 this year. It should be a moment of pride and reflection on what we have built, the sacrifices that built it, and what it still represents to the free world. Instead, a generation has been taught that America is a story of theft, oppression, racist founders, and irredeemable sins. This is not an accident but rather the intended outcome of a coordinated effort to replace civic education with constant grievance against America. And the late Howard Zinn, an avowed Marxist, is its founding father.

This is how it works in practice. A left-leaning schoolteacher assigns a chapter from a book to a classroom full of 10th-graders, introducing it with cryptic and conspiratorial language: “This is the real history they don’t want you to know about.” The teacher doesn’t say “here’s another perspective to consider,” nor “here’s a primary source, let’s analyze it together.” Instead, kids are teased with insider-club language of “they have been lying to you about America, and this book has the truth.”

The vague villain hidden behind the “they” pronoun isn’t revealed, as that might lead to questions about why “they” were unable to stop the supposedly truth-telling teacher from spilling all these alleged secrets in a government-funded classroom.

That’s the Howard Zinn franchise in a nutshell.

And I say franchise deliberately, because Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States is no longer just a book. It’s a brand, a distribution network, and a mainstream curriculum replacement that has been boldly reshaping what American children and college students understand about their own country for 45 years.

More than four million copies of A People’s History have been sold since 1980. When I was a left-leaning college student I had a copy of his book on my shelf. It has been assigned in high schools and colleges in all 50 states. A People’s History ranks among the top 15 most-assigned books within American college history syllabi.

For context, Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto ranks 7th on the overall most-assigned list, appearing on 11,407 syllabi across all college courses. The Federalist Papers didn’t crack the top 100. That tells you everything you need to know about the ideological direction of American higher education.

The Zinn Education Project (ZEP), the nonprofit built to push Zinn’s framework directly into K-12 classrooms, now counts more than 179,000 registered teachers, with 822,000 lesson plan downloads and several new teacher sign-ups every month. The ZEP is a joint project of two left-wing charitable nonprofits: Teaching for Change and Rethinking Schools. The Teaching for Change mission statement is: “Building social justice starting in the classroom” [emphasis in original]. Similarly, Rethinking Schools is “dedicated to sustaining and strengthening public education through social justice teaching and education activism.”

So, it’s easy to think of the ZEP as more “reeducation” than education.

One teacher featured on the ZEP’s website, a high school social studies teacher in Portland, Oregon, said it without apology:

The Zinn Education Project is my compass in a sea of corporate textbooks, packaged common core curriculum, and standardized testing. My entire curriculum is based on lessons that can be found on the Zinn Education Project.

Another teacher, a high school history teacher in Evanston, Illinois, describes nine years of using ZEP materials by saying that his students “can speak to the power of deconstructing the narratives of Christopher Columbus and Abraham Lincoln’s efforts that have replicated white supremacy.” The lessons, he says, “invigorate students’ desire to learn and disrupt the status quo.” This isn’t a supplement to American history education. It has become the replacement, and disrupting the status quo is the whole point.

I watched it personally during my 15 years as a credentialed public schoolteacher in California. The teachers reaching for these lessons were not neutral educators who stumbled into bad material. They were true believing, left-leaning teachers who looked upon the classroom as an opportunity for social change rather than academic instruction. They wanted free, pre-packaged lessons that confirmed what they already thought about America. The Zinn Education Project was happy to oblige with activist-designed material that is pre-loaded with the moral authority of “social justice.”

Howard Zinn was a self-described Marxist and once a secretive Communist Party member. He was a political activist first, a historian second, and he didn’t hide those priorities. In 1995, Zinn wrote: “I wanted my writing of history and my teaching of history to be a part of social struggle. I wanted to be a part of history and not just a recorder and teacher of history.” In a 2005 interview, he put it plainly: “I don’t believe in neutrality. I believe neutrality is impossible.”

And when it came to the economic system of the country whose history he was teaching, Zinn didn’t hide his contempt. He openly declared that “capitalism has always been a failure for the lower classes.” In March 2009, he celebrated the financial crisis by saying: “The American capitalist system is falling apart. And good! I’m glad it’s falling apart.” This is the man whose framework shapes the worldview of hundreds of thousands of American students.

Zinn’s education project distorts, omits, and reframes American history to build a predetermined conclusion: that America is guilty, that Western civilization is the source of great suffering, should not be celebrated, and the only answer is a dismantling of the systems freedom-lovers hold dear. A look at some of the ZEP’s most popular lessons taught to students across America demonstrates how this occurs.

Miseducation #1: Columbus the villain

Pre-Columbus America was no paradise. It was a complex, often violent world, exactly like everywhere else on earth in 1492. Teaching students otherwise isn’t justice; it is just a different kind of lie.

Here’s what a history lesson looks like when the verdict is decided before the trial begins.

The People vs Columbus is a Zinn lesson designed as a mock trial in which students are asked to determine who is responsible for the deaths of the Taíno people after 1492. Sounds like critical thinking, right? Except the lesson opens by declaring, without qualification, that a genocide was committed in the years after 1492 on the islands inhabited by the Taíno. The lesson material throws out the Taíno population at the time of Columbus’s arrival as five million, then quietly walks it back further in, quoting: “When you arrived in the Greater Antilles, there may have been as many as a million or even 3 million Taíno on the islands. According to Bartolomé de las Casas, by 1542, there were 200 observable Taíno left.”

Let’s do some math that no teen in a classroom is going to attempt.

If anywhere from one million to five million Taíno died in roughly fifty years, that works out to between 20,000 and 100,000 deaths per year (quite the range), which works out to be around 50 and 300 Taíno killed every single day, without a break for half a century. This would mean that Columbus and a few hundred men were running a literal bloodbath on several islands simultaneously for fifty years straight.

This ZEP lesson presents the numbers as settled fact. I doubt any student stops to wonder whether that accounting is even logistically possible, and that is intentional. Absorbed in a riveting story with death and violence, kids don’t question outlandish numbers handed to them with moral authority attached.

The lesson also doesn’t bother to mention that if there truly were millions killed, the majority would have been from disease. Instead, it repeatedly states that Columbus and his men were killing all the Taino, throws out speculative and exaggerated population numbers, and leaves students with the impression that the ever-guilty Europeans slaughtered all.

And the source material the lesson draws on describes Taíno society in unrealistic, idealized terms. The Taíno are depicted as an island full of angels, striving to feed all people and maintaining a spirituality that respected all animals (including their main animal food sources), as well as natural forces like climate, season, and weather. By day, they fished and planted gardens. By night, they discussed the coming seasons in perfect ecological harmony. So peaceful. So pure. So completely stripped of any complexity that might complicate the morality play the ZEP needs to run.

Just in case the anti-colonial messaging wasn’t clear enough, the lesson helpfully identifies the most egregious villain: not Columbus, nor even Spain, but private property. According to the lesson:

The real responsibility lies with a system that values property over people. European society was set up so that an individual had to own property to feel secure. There was no security without private ownership of property. If you were poor, you could starve. By contrast, the Taíno had no ‘poor,’ and no one starved. The Taíno shared the land and resources and respected Mother Earth. They saw –and still see– all living beings as interconnected.

A good communist lesson can’t just have individual villains. It needs to blame a system, and the system that is blamed in this lesson is a bedrock of our free American society. And the Taíno aren’t just sympathetic victims in this telling. They live in a socialist utopia, a pre-capitalist paradise where nobody owns anything and nobody goes hungry. This is not an accurate retelling of history; it is ideological fiction dressed as education. The archaeological and true historical record of pre-Columbian societies tells a far messier story, but messy doesn’t serve the lesson plan.

The ZEP’s attack on Columbus, a key part of their war on Western civilization, doesn’t stop at the classroom. They run an active campaign, listed under their official campaigns tab, called Abolish Columbus Day, where they declare that celebrating Columbus means celebrating colonialism, celebrating racism, and celebrating genocide.

The Zinn framework never asks students to consider that conquest, territorial expansion, and brutal warfare are not exclusively European inventions imported to an innocent continent of brown people in 1492. These were, and are, universal human behaviors, including among indigenous peoples.

The Aztec Empire was not a peace-loving nature commune. The Aztecs were a militaristic empire that practiced mass human sacrifice on a staggering scale, with tens of thousands of captives killed yearly to appease their many gods. When Hernán Cortés arrived in Mexico, the neighboring tribes, the people the Aztecs had been raiding, enslaving, and sacrificing for generations, did not mourn his arrival. They allied with Cortés to bring down their oppressors.

The Comanche were one of the most formidable and feared raiding societies in North American history, regularly taking captives and running extensive slave networks. The Cherokee owned black slaves and, when the Civil War came, a significant faction fought for the Confederacy to protect that institution. None of this appears in ZEP curriculum because it complicates the clean moral narrative they need: white, European, and capitalist is bad, while brown, indigenous, and commune–style economy is good.

Ironically, a documentary named The Columbus Controversy: Challenging How History Is Written, is listed as a supplementary resource on the ZEP lesson page. It was produced for classrooms by American School Publishers, a Macmillan/McGraw-Hill company, one of the major mainstream curriculum publishers. Using this documentary’s romanticized revisionism rips up the premise that the ZEP is bravely countering a whitewashed establishment narrative. In this case the ZEP is regurgitating widespread leftist propaganda promoted by massive publishing houses to the majority of classrooms in the country.

Pre-Columbus America was no paradise. It was a complex, often violent world, exactly like everywhere else on Earth in 1492. Teaching students otherwise isn’t justice; it is just a different kind of lie.

Miseducation #2: The Founders as villains

For context, Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto ranks 7th on the overall most-assigned list, appearing on 11,407 syllabi across all college courses. The Federalist Papers didn’t crack the top 100. That tells you everything you need to know about the ideological direction of American higher education.

The idea for this report came to me as I stood in the slave quarters at Mount Vernon. I was there with colleagues from the Capital Research Center, walking through what remains of the lives of the 317 enslaved people who worked Washington’s beautiful estate when he died in 1799. They lived in cramped spaces, in close proximity to the grand main house, and seeing how they lived, I could feel the weight of what those people endured.

I didn’t leave feeling like Washington was a hero without flaw. I left feeling the full complexity of the contradiction: a man who led a revolution for human liberty while holding other human beings in bondage. That tension is real. It deserves to be taught. What it does not deserve is what the Zinn Education Project does with it.

As America marks its 250th anniversary the ZEP has positioned itself as the counter-messaging to anyone who wants students to feel pride in the accomplishment. Their FAQs on the American Revolution, published this year, explains:

In 2026, many of the groups that have led the campaigns to ban books and censor history are focusing their efforts on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. These include the Heritage Foundation, Hillsdale College, Moms for Liberty, PragerU, Turning Point USA, and more. We are focusing on the 250th anniversary as well.

Their answer to Turning Point USA and the rest of us is a lesson catalog designed to ensure that students spend the anniversary of American independence learning about everything the Revolution failed to accomplish rather than what it did. Since the ZEP has a plethora of lessons on this subject, the FAQ document itself is worth examining in detail, because it reveals exactly how ZEP frames the founding for the 176,000 teachers in its network.

Asked whether the American Revolution put into motion “the inevitable wheels of liberty” that led to emancipation, the ZEP answers flatly: “No. The idea that emancipation was inevitable after 1776 is a national myth.” The document goes further, arguing that students should learn “what the American Revolution changed, rule by a king, and what it did not, including slavery, settler colonialism, and unequal political power.”

Telling students the Revolution failed because it didn’t immediately abolish slavery is like telling students that the Wright Brothers failed because the 1903 Flyer couldn’t cross the Atlantic. It judges a first flight by the standards of a destination that the flight itself made possible.

Asked whether it is unfair to judge the Founders by today’s moral standards, the ZEP answers no, and their reasoning deserves scrutiny. They argue that critiques of slavery existed at the time, so they are not applying modern standards to the condemnation of slavery. That’s partially true, there were some abolitionists in 1776. But what ZEP is actually doing in its lessons is far broader than noting that some contemporaries opposed slavery. It is asking students to evaluate the entire founding through a 2026 lens of systemic racism, settler colonialism, and capitalist exploitation. These frameworks didn’t even exist in 1776 and wouldn’t exist today if the American Revolution hadn’t been successful.

Here is the question the ZEP never asks: What world were the Founders actually operating in?

In 1776, slavery existed on every continent. No nation on earth had universal abolition. No prior civilization had established individual rights against the power of the state the way the Founders did. The very moral vocabulary that the ZEP uses to condemn the founding (human rights, self-determination, equality before the law) is an aftermath product of the American Revolution.

The FAQ goes further still. Asked whether the American Revolution was “the most revolutionary” independence war, the ZEP answers no, arguing that the 1804 Haitian Revolution  (which abolished slavery outright) was more “genuinely revolutionary.” What ZEP doesn’t tell students is that the Haitian Revolution was followed by more than a century of devastating poverty, political instability, authoritarian rule, and isolation. The revolution in Haiti was marked by the slaughter of white people and inspired by the bloody French Revolution. The model the ZEP holds up as superior to the American founding produced one of the poorest and most chronically unstable nations in the hemisphere.

But there is a deeper problem with using Haiti as the yardstick, and it quietly demolishes the entire premise of the lesson. The ZEP celebrates Haiti precisely because the enslaved liberated themselves. Self-liberation on that scale is almost unheard of in human history. Haiti stands very nearly alone. It is the only time in the modern world that an enslaved population overthrew its masters by force and then founded a sovereign nation.

Everywhere else, freedom came from the outside or from above. The British Empire didn’t end slavery through a slave revolt; it was abolished by Parliament. The trans-Atlantic slave trade’s top benefactor, Brazil, ended slavery by imperial decree in 1888. And the four million people enslaved in the United States were freed not by their own uprising but by the Union Army, the Thirteenth Amendment, and 360,000 Union soldiers who died making emancipation real. Slaves almost never freed themselves, anywhere on Earth. Which means the very standard the ZEP uses to indict the American founding is one that virtually no nation in history has ever met.

Yes, many of the major Founders owned slaves. This should be taught. But what ZEP buries is that nearly all of them expressed, at some point, a genuine desire to see the institution ended.

Washington wrote in 1786 that there was “not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it.” Washington also freed his enslaved people in his will.

Jefferson, for all his catastrophic hypocrisy on the subject, originally drafted language condemning the slave trade directly into the Declaration of Independence.

John Adams owned no slaves and called the institution “an evil of colossal magnitude.”

Benjamin Franklin, who had owned slaves earlier in his life, became president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society and in 1790 personally submitted one of the first antislavery petitions to Congress.

Alexander Hamilton was a founding member of the New York Manumission Society, which worked to end slavery in New York and educate freed black children.

James Madison, despite being a slaveholder himself, said at the Constitutional Convention that it would be “wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men.”

None of this excuses the moral failures of men who preached liberty while holding human beings in bondage. But it tells a fundamentally different story than the ZEP’s version, which is the oversimplified idea that the Founders were simply property-protecting elites with little to no moral reckoning on the subject.

Back at Mount Vernon, some of the stories that stayed with me were those of Hercules, Washington’s chef, who earned money on the side, with Washington’s permission, by selling kitchen leftovers. Hercules eventually escaped to freedom in 1797 and was formally freed under the terms of Washington’s will. William Lee, Washington’s personal valet through the entire Revolutionary War, was freed immediately upon Washington’s death. These were people with some agency navigating a brutal institution on their own terms wherever they could. The ZEP has no room for this context and complexity, because none of it serves the thesis of “Founding Fathers as villains.”

Thomas Sowell put it this way: “What was special about America was not that it had slavery, which existed all over the world, but that Americans were among the very few peoples who began to question the morality of holding human beings in bondage.” And in Race and Culture he wrote that slavery was “peculiar” in the United States only because human bondage was inconsistent with the principles on which the nation was founded. Historically, it was those great principles that were peculiar, not slavery.

Is it about time that we have a Sowell Education Project with K-12 lessons based on his work?

Miseducation #3: The Constitution as enemy of the people

Telling students the Revolution failed because it didn’t immediately abolish slavery is like telling students that the Wright Brothers failed because the 1903 Flyer couldn’t cross the Atlantic. It judges a first flight by the standards of a destination that the flight itself made possible.

Unfortunately, there is no Sowell Education Project. There is only the ZEP, and once it has finished prosecuting the men who founded the country, it turns on the thing they built. The Zinn Education Project doesn’t just want students to question the Constitution. It wants them to see it as a weapon aimed at them.

The Constitution Gallery Walk is a classroom activity designed for grades 6 through 12 in which students move from station to station through a series of posters, each one building on the last toward a single predetermined conclusion. The ten posters carry titles such as “A Constitution for the One Percent,” “Rights for Property, Not People,” “Built to Block Change,” and “Checks, Balances, and Barriers.” Each delivers a bite-sized Marxist critique of the founding document in large, easy-to-read font. No counterargument or nuance, just the verdict, repeated ten times around the room.

Here’s a sample of what students are reading as they walk from poster to poster. The Constitution, students are told, “was written in secret by 55 wealthy white men to serve a tiny minority and clamp down on the rights of everyone else.” The system of checks and balances “protects economic elites by constraining the efforts of the majority of people to change an unjust status quo.” The Preamble is “not even legally binding.” And the whole document is “a feature, not a bug, created by the Framers to stifle the public will in perpetuity.”

This is the document that protects your right to speak, to worship, to refuse unreasonable searches of your home, and to face your accuser in court. Is this document “stifling the public will in perpetuity?”

The ZEP website publishes the teacher testimonials from this activity. A high school social studies teacher in Flushing, New York, reports that after completing the gallery walk, students “commented on how the Constitution was written in secret and how the system of checks and balances helped only certain groups of people.” She adds, with apparent satisfaction, that students “felt that the Constitution was an old document that should continue to be revised and compared it to the Bible.” She closes by noting that students “are really afraid for their future, and I am too.”

Read that again. The desired outcome of this lesson, proudly reported by the teacher who taught it, is that students leave the classroom afraid of the US Constitution and their future. It is also worth noting that the students walked away viewing the Constitution the way secularists view Scripture, as an outdated text written by fallible men that enlightened people no longer have to take seriously.

The recommended reading list for the lesson makes these goals even clearer.

We the Elites: Why the U.S. Constitution Serves the Few by Robert Ovetz, listed for high school students, calls the Constitution “a rulebook to protect capitalism for the elites” and concludes that “change can only be made by tearing up the rule book and starting over again from the bottom up.” That quote is featured on the ZEP website.

The Constitutional Bind by Aziz Rana argues that Americans’ reverence for the founding document has “unleashed an interventionist national security state abroad while undermining the possibility of deeper change at home.” This turns history on its head. The Constitution is nothing if not a list of limits on government power and abuse, drawn up in response to what our Declaration of Independence referred to as a “history of repeated injuries and usurpations” inflicted by the British.

There are obviously far too many modern examples of where the Constitution has failed to keep the government in check. But it’s educational malpractice to blame those failures on the Constitution written to prevent the abuses and the people who celebrate that honorable objective.

The gallery walk, the books, and the teacher testimonials all celebrate students who are frightened and skeptical of their own founding document. None of this is accidental. It is a curriculum with a goal, and the goal is a generation of young Americans who feel no particular attachment to (or obligation to defend) the document that has protected human liberty longer than any other in the history of the world.

Frederick Douglass read that same Constitution after surviving the horrors of slavery and called it a “glorious liberty document.” The ZEP is handing middle schoolers a poster that calls it a “tool of the one percent.” One of those readings produces proud citizens. The other produces jaded radicals.

Miseducation #4: Become the Black Panthers

A teenager was tortured and executed by the very organization the ZEP asks tenth graders to model their manifestos on, and the lesson never says a word about it.

I have a simple question for any parent reading this. Would you be comfortable knowing that your 10^th grader spent a week in school studying the Black Panther Party’s political manifesto and was then assigned to write their own version of it?

That’s what this next ZEP lesson asks students to do.

The lesson is called “What We Want, What We Believe”: Teaching with the Black Panthers’ 10-Point Program. The goal is for students to study the Panther’s 1972 platform, analyze it as a model of political organizing, and develop their own Ten Point Programs that reflect their personal and community grievances. This lesson is also available in Spanish, because, of course, it is vital that English learners know about the grievance list of the Black Panthers, right?

The ZEP’s framing of who the Panthers were is, to put it charitably, selective. The lesson describes the Black Panther Party as an organization that “sought social justice for African Americans and other oppressed communities through a combination of revolutionary theory, education, and community programs.” And yes, their community programs, such as breakfast programs and free clinics, were real and should be acknowledged as part of the movement.

But that is less than half the story.

There is no mention of the Panthers’ documented history of violence, murder, and criminal enterprise. No mention of Huey Newton (the cofounder of the Black Panthers) and his conviction for voluntary manslaughter of a police officer. No mention of the FBI’s COINTELPRO program, which could have been used as legitimate debate material about real government overreach. Issues like these are not mentioned because honesty about the Panthers’ record would complicate the heroic framing the ZEP needs.

And there is no mention of what the Panthers did to Alex Rackley.

In May 1969, Rackley was a 19-year-old member of the party’s New York chapter. That’s when fellow Panthers in New Haven decided he was an FBI informant. They held him captive at the chapter’s headquarters and tortured him for days, scalding him with boiling water to force a taped confession. On May 21, two Panthers, Warren Kimbro and Lonnie McLucas, drove Rackley to a swamp in Middlefield, Connecticut, and shot him in the head and chest on the orders of national field marshal George Sams, Jr. Kimbro and Sams later pleaded guilty for their part in the crime and McLucas was convicted by a jury.

A teenager was tortured and executed by the very organization the ZEP asks tenth graders to model their manifestos on, and the lesson never says a word about it.

This is an intentional omission, and a common theme of their methods. When the ZEP wants students to condemn a group, it spares them nothing: the Columbus lesson narrates the slaughter of the Taíno in graphic detail and exaggerates the body count past anything serious historians will defend. When ZEP wants students to admire a group, the violence vanishes. A documented torture-murder by the Panthers, against one of their own, doesn’t earn a sentence, while a contested death toll from five centuries ago gets a full mock trial.

The Panthers were also a Marxist-Leninist organization that openly advocated armed revolution against the United States government. Their Ten-Point Program describes the American government as “racist and fascist.” This is the document that the ZEP lesson asks students to study and then rewrite as their own.

Some other points from the Program:

• Point Two states that if American businessmen will not provide full employment, “the technology and means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community.” Seizing the means to production is textbook Marxism.
• Point Three calls the American government flatly racist and demands reparations, citing “the slaughter of over 50 million Black people” by American racists.
• Point Seven demands an end to “police brutality and murder” and declares it the right of all black and oppressed people to “arm for self-defense of our homes and communities against these fascist police forces.”
• Point Eight calls for an end to “all wars of aggression” and declares it “the right of the people to defend themselves by any means necessary against their aggressors.”
• Point Nine calls for the “ultimate elimination of all wretched, inhuman penal institutions,” not demanding reform of the prison system, but elimination of it.

The author of the ZEP Panther lesson is upfront about his expectations. He writes that he had hoped his predominantly black students would demonstrate “a stronger, more personal connection to the injustices experienced by the black community” and that he was “expecting all the students to be frustrated with the world, ready to let loose their seething resentment and alienation.” He was, in his own words, disappointed when some students weren’t angry enough. He was grading his students on their level of radicalization.

Now look at what the students actually produced, which the ZEP publishes approvingly.

One student created a Ten Point Program demanding the dismantling of capitalism: “We want the mask of capitalism lifted, and economic classes disbanded.” He demanded an end to “the war against Iraq to protect U.S. oil prices,” an immediate end to “corporate funding of education,” and concluded: “The enslavement of the middle and lower classes by the bourgeoisie must be put to a stop.” The teacher describes this as demonstrating “a growing consciousness” and notes that classmates were “impressed by Marcus’ articulation of political ideas.”

A 10^th grader demanded the abolition of economic classes and asserted that hard-working Americans were enslaved by the bourgeoisie. The teacher’s response was admiration.

Another student produced what amounts to a full-blown leftist policy platform: free housing for homeless people, more people of color in schools, less police brutality, and free healthcare for low-income people. Some of these are legitimate policy positions that reasonable people debate. But this is a ten-point program modeled on a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary party’s manifesto, produced by a fifteen-year-old who has been primed for two weeks with materials presenting the American government as racist and fascist. The lesson isn’t teaching civic engagement. It’s teaching a specific conclusion about what is wrong with America and recruiting students to demand it be fixed on the Panthers’ terms.

A third student wrote a Ten Point Program for the LGBTQ community. The teacher notes approvingly that the student “did not feel comfortable sharing her piece in class” due to what he calls “the level of homophobia in our society and our schools.” A high school student writing a political manifesto for a cause she is afraid to share out loud, in a classroom that has spent weeks priming her to see American society as oppressive and her school as a site of homophobia – The ZEP presents this as a success story.

Here is what the lesson never asks. Was the Black Panther Party’s diagnosis of America accurate? Were their proposed solutions constitutional? Did their advocacy of armed self-defense against police produce better or worse outcomes for black communities? What happened to the neighborhoods where the Panthers were most active? Were the community programs sustainable, and why did they ultimately collapse? What alternatives existed, and what did those alternatives achieve?

None of those questions appear. The Panthers are presented as a model. Students are asked to adopt the model for their own grievances. The teacher grades them on how much resentment is sown.

Miseducation #5: Defenders of communists

A good communist lesson can’t just have individual villains. It needs to blame a system, and the system that is blamed in this lesson is private property ownership—a bedrock of our free American society.

Let me be clear about what the Subversives: Stories from the Red Scare lesson actually is before the ZEP’s framing of it gets into your head. It is a mixer activity in which students are assigned the identities of 27 people targeted during the McCarthy Era, and the lesson material admits that many were literal Communist Party members or close affiliates. Then students are asked to circulate the classroom speaking in first person as those characters. The lesson is designed for grades 6 through 12. Sixth graders are role-playing as communists who believe themselves to be victims.

The lesson’s author opens by stating one of the ZEP’s explicit organizational goals: “One of the guiding tenets of the Zinn Education Project is that the transformational social change so desperately needed will never come from above, from presidents and CEOs. It will come from people like us, like our students — and like the many everyday people profiled in this lesson.”

This is a mission statement for a political movement. The lesson is a recruiting tool.

It gets worse. The author is not merely interested in rehabilitating the historical reputations of people who were treated unfairly during the McCarthy Era. She is drawing an explicit line from the 1950s to today. The lesson states plainly: “Today, activists who call for abolition of prisons and police, or a complete moratorium on fossil fuel extraction, or a jobs guarantee for every American, are often dismissed as impractical, imprudent, utopian, and yes, sometimes they’re red-baited as well.”

Read that carefully. The lesson is not just teaching the McCarthy Era. It is teaching students that anyone who criticizes people calling for the abolition of prisons and police is engaged in the same McCarthyite repression of the 1950s. If you question the sanity of defunding the police, or ending American energy production, then you are the new McCarthy.

This is being taught to sixth graders.

The lesson also makes explicit what it thinks is happening to the left today:

Whereas ‘communist’ became shorthand for any undesirable person or belief in the eyes of the elites, so today ‘voter fraud’ is used by Republicans to disenfranchise ‘undesirable’ voters who threaten to upset their traditional seats of power, and Critical Race Theory acts as a sweeping indictment of white supremacy’s critics.

That is a direct partisan attack on Republicans, embedded in a history lesson, for middle schoolers.

Now look at what the lesson actually produces in classrooms. A high school teacher in Woodbridge, Virginia, reports that her favorite part is when students conclude that people who were “homosexual, community leaders, social activists, people of color” were targeted and labeled as communists, presenting a communist apologist view that government concern about actual Communist Party members as nothing more than racism and homophobia. A high school teacher in Baltimore reports with satisfaction that students “made connections between their lives and the lives of historical figures” after learning about communist organizers who were surveilled by the FBI.

But the most revealing testimonial comes from a student teacher in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who taught the lesson and then published his students’ written responses on the ZEP’s website. One student wrote:

I think a lot of people can agree derogatory terms are always going to be around. Today, people see words like [slur] to describe and discriminate against the trans community. During the BLM movement, Trump would call the African American protesters thugs, even when they had peaceful protests. But he called white RIOTERS who broke into the Capitol building were simply “rightfully angry American civilians.”

That student’s response was submitted to the ZEP’s website as evidence of a successful lesson. A student who just spent a class period roleplaying as Communist Party members and union radicals has now connected that experience to a defense of BLM protests and an attack on Donald Trump. The student teacher calls it “an energetic success.” The ZEP publishes it as a glowing testimonial.

Another student wrote that the lesson showed “people who had differing ideas from white America” were targeted, conveniently erasing the documented reality that many of the historical figures in the mixer lesson were actual members of an organization that was actively working with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and some of them were white.

Here is what the lesson doesn’t teach. The Soviet Union was a totalitarian state responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of its own citizens through gulags, engineered famines, and political executions. The Communist Party USA did receive direction and funding from Moscow. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, whose story is touched upon in the lesson’s broader unit, were in fact passing nuclear secrets to the Soviets. The Venona papers, declassified in 1995, confirmed that Soviet espionage in the United States was real and extensive.

None of this is in the Zinn lesson. Doing so would complicate the lesson’s portrait of McCarthy-era victims as pure-hearted social justice organizers crushed by a racist, homophobic government.

McCarthyism did produce some genuine injustices. Some people who were not Soviet agents lost jobs and reputations through guilt-by-association and little evidence. That is true and worth teaching. What is not true is the lesson’s implication that anti-communism was simply a cover for suppressing civil rights and labor activism, that everyone targeted was innocent, and those that criticize the far left’s plans to abolish prisons and fossil fuels are the direct heirs of McCarthy’s persecution.

Miseducation #6: America the terrorist

He wanted fewer Americans willing to defend America. He wrote a lesson plan to produce them. And ZEP put it in 176,000 teachers’ hands.

Two weeks after nearly 3,000 Americans were murdered at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Zinn Education Project had a lesson plan ready. It’s called “Whose Terrorism?” and it is one of the most methodologically dishonest pieces of classroom material I have ever read. (And I have read a lot of them.)

Here’s how it works. Students are given ten historical scenarios involving violence, civilian deaths, and the abuse of power. But the names of every country involved have been replaced with fictional ones. The teacher who designed the lesson is upfront about why: he didn’t trust students to label American actions as terrorism if they knew America was the one doing them. His solution was to hide the ball. Strip away prior knowledge, strip away national identity, and guide students toward the conclusion he had already reached before the lesson started.

Every single one of those ten scenarios implicates the United States or Israel. Every one. The US funding of Nicaraguan Contras, who attacked schools and clinics. The US missile strike on a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant. US corporations paying poverty wages abroad. US military aid to Israel. US investment in apartheid South Africa. US backed sanctions on Iraq. The IMF and World Bank, institutions the lesson frames as instruments of American economic terror, forcing Zambia to pay debt service instead of buying AIDS medicine.

Ten scenarios. Ten indictments of America and its allies. And even setting aside what’s missing from the lesson, what’s actually in it doesn’t hold up to basic scrutiny. Each scenario is stripped of any historical complexity, presented in clean black-and-white terms that make the moral verdict obvious before the students even start discussing the issues.

Take the Israel-Palestine scenario. The conflict between those two groups spans decades of wars, terrorist attacks in both directions, complicated land disputes, and a history that serious scholars have spent careers trying to understand. The ZEP gives 11th graders a paragraph. One paragraph, written to produce one conclusion, with no context for how the conflict began, what preceded it, or what any of the parties actually wanted.

Or consider the Monsanto scenario. A corporation develops genetically modified seeds and plants and tests crops in India. The farmers, furious, announce they will burn every genetically modified crop to the ground, and they threaten to destroy Monsanto’s offices. Now, the ethics of genetically modified crops is a genuinely complex debate and one worth having in a classroom. Reasonable people disagree.

But the lesson isn’t a debate. It wants students to ask whether Monsanto is the terrorist. The farmers who are literally announcing plans to destroy property and threaten corporate offices? The lesson presents them as righteous resisters. The corporation that invented the seeds? Terrorists.

This reminded me of watching the BLM riots of 2020, when activists and their media allies tied themselves in knots trying to label police officers protecting businesses as agents of state sponsored terror, while actual buildings were burning, windows were being smashed, and stores were still being looted. The rhetorical trick is the same: stretch the definition of terrorism so far that it covers your political enemies, then contract it just enough to exclude your political allies, even when they are literally setting things on fire.

The ZEP’s lesson teaches this trick to middle schoolers and calls it critical thinking. It doesn’t sharpen students’ ability to define terrorism. It teaches them to apply the word selectively and strategically, always in one direction.

Not one of the ZEP terrorism scenarios uses the substance of the September 11 attacks on America. Not one involves Hamas suicide bombings on Israeli buses. Not one involves Iranian-sponsored terrorism. Not one involves the Taliban’s systematic murder and enslavement of Afghan women. Not one involves the persecution of Christians in Nigeria, Pakistan, North Korea, or China. Not one involves the Uyghur concentration camps in China. Not one involves any act of violence committed by any majority-Muslim government or organization, anywhere on Earth, in the entire history of the world.

The lesson was written in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Its stated goal, in the teacher’s own words, is that the more students understand American power, “the less likely they are to want to extend it.” He wanted fewer Americans willing to defend America. He wrote a lesson plan to produce them. And ZEP put it in 176,000 teachers’ hands.

The teacher closes by quoting a student he presents as evidence of success:

I also realized how many terrorism acts the U.S. has committed. When our government doesn’t define terrorism, it makes me think that they just want a free shot to kill anyone they want.

That’s a ninth grader. That is what this lesson produced. And the teacher wrote it down and published it proudly.

Now look at what the teachers using this lesson today have to say about it. A high school social studies teacher in Nashua, New Hampshire, calls it his favorite ZEP lesson because “it lets the educator teach from the perspective of the other, which is crucial to the classroom of today.” A high school social studies teacher in Skowhegan, Maine, reports that her students “believe that terrorism is exclusive to Middle Eastern-based groups or religious zealots,” and that the lesson fixes this problem: “My students are always amazed at how many of these situations actually involved the United States as the perpetrator of things that they deem to be terrorism.” A high school teacher in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, celebrates the moment when students have their “Aha!” moment as “their stereotypes are shattered.” That stereotype apparently being the assumption that America is generally a force for good in the world.

And then there is the middle school teacher in Pennsylvania who teaches this lesson to students whose main point of reference for terrorism was 9/11 and then, for homework, assigns them a worksheet identifying all the fictional country names with their real counterparts. He notes proudly that with his more advanced AP students, he extends the lesson by connecting it to January 6th. Because of course he does.

The one teacher who tries to add any balance notes that she tells students that “this is not meant to vilify the United States, but to make sure that we are looking at all of these examples in order to discover the truth.” The truth? With a lesson where every single scenario indicts America and zero scenarios indict any other actor on Earth?

Now, in the spirit of the lesson’s own methodology, here is one more scenario they forgot to include. The names have been changed.

A corporation operating in the country of Amoria receives over half a billion dollars annually from the Amorian federal government. It operates hundreds of pregnancy clinics concentrated in low-income, minority neighborhoods. Its founders explicitly wrote about reducing the population of what they considered “undesirable” groups, using words like “human weeds” to describe the poor and minorities.

Today, the corporation performs the majority of its procedures in communities of color. In Amoria’s largest city, more babies of one particular ethnic group are often terminated than are born alive in a given year. The corporation lobbies aggressively against any legal restrictions on these procedures, funds political campaigns, and has cultivated relationships with media organizations that consistently describe its work as “healthcare.” Government officials who question its taxpayer funding are accused of waging a war on women.

Questions: 1. Which, if any, of these activities should be considered “terrorism” according to your definition? 2. Who are the “terrorists?” 3. What more would you need to know to be surer of your answer?

Amoria is the United States. The corporation is Planned Parenthood. The city is New York, where for several years running, more black babies were aborted than born alive. The founder is Margaret Sanger, whose eugenicist writings are extensively documented and whose organization has quietly scrubbed her name from its flagship clinic. The annual federal funding has sometimes exceeded $600 million.

By the lesson’s own logic and its own methodology, this qualifies for the exercise. You will never find it in a ZEP lesson plan because the exercise was never about thinking consistently. It was about thinking correctly. And correctly, in ZEP world, means one direction only, and that is guilt about America, and away from any instinct to defend it.

Miseducation #7: Teaching one side of the Israel-Palestine conflict

The teacher testimonials shared on the ZEP website are candid about what the lesson produces. [ . . .] A teacher in New Jersey describes the current situation in Gaza not as contested or alleged but simply as “the current genocide.” A teacher in Michigan reports her class classified the war as genocide, then examined campus protests as a natural follow-up.

If you were going to teach 9^th graders about one of the most complex, politically contested conflicts in modern history, with Jewish students, Muslim students, and Palestinian students potentially sitting in the same room, would you design a lesson whose conclusion is written before the students open their mouths?

That is exactly what the ZEP’s “Teaching the Seeds of Violence in Palestine-Israel” does.

Released in 2024, following the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, the lesson is a mixer activity in which students play 17 historical figures and circulate the classroom in character. The stated central question is: “What is the source of this violence?” But the answer is provided before the question is fully asked. The lesson’s organizing framework, drawn from Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, declares upfront that the modern history of Palestine is best understood as a colonial war waged against the indigenous population to force them off their land. Students are then asked to find the seeds of this preordained crime.

I took a deep dive into this lesson when it was being taught at Grant High School in Portland, Oregon, in a 9th-grade class. Students were assigned to play historical characters such as Theodor Herzl, the Viennese father of Zionism; Lord Balfour; an idealistic young Zionist settler; a Beirut landlord who sold vast tracts of Palestinian land; and Palestinian peasants who were evicted from their homes. Students were asked to internalize these roles so thoroughly that they could “become” that person in the activity, speaking only in the first-person.

The lesson also warns students not to use accents, noting that it would be culturally insensitive–apparently unaware that the entire exercise had already sailed far past that point.

And here is the thing nobody seems to want to say out loud: these role assignments are random. That means a Palestinian student could be assigned to play the role of the father of Zionism. A Jewish student could be assigned to play a Palestinian peasant displaced by Jewish settlers. In a room full of students with real families and real identities, that is not pedagogy but rather a traumatizing liability for students who may have real emotional stakes in this conflict.

The “Possible Defendants” handout makes the lesson’s orientation unmistakable. Students choose who is guilty of laying the groundwork for today’s violence from a list that includes Zionism, Theodor Herzl, the Balfour Declaration, private ownership of land, and nationalism. Hamas does not appear. October 7th is mentioned in the introduction only to be immediately set aside. The lesson’s explicit purpose is to establish that the violence did not begin with the Hamas attacks. The sample essay the ZEP publishes as a model names Arthur Ruppin, the early Zionist land organizer, as the individual “most responsible for today’s violence,” calls his work “the poisonous seed,” and concludes he practiced apartheid. That is the exemplary piece chosen to show students exactly what a successful paper looks like.

The teacher testimonials shared on the ZEP website are candid about what the lesson produces. A teacher in Phoenix reports students connecting current Israeli policy directly to “the ideology and policies of Zionists” and comparing Palestine to other colonial projects such as India, Sudan, and the Congo. A teacher in New Jersey describes the current situation in Gaza not as contested or alleged but simply as “the current genocide.” A teacher in Michigan reports her class classified the war as genocide, then examined campus protests as a natural follow-up.

Here is what the lesson does not include: no role for any victim of October 7th; no representation of the 1,200 Israelis killed that day; no mention of Hamas’s founding charter; no Israeli civilians living under years of rocket fire; and no hostages. The lesson covers history only through 1922, a convenient stopping point.

A student conclusion published approvingly on the ZEP website captures the lesson’s destination perfectly: “Zionists are invading, and the core of Zionism is removing all non-Jews completely. Zionists don’t try to cooperate at all. Just remove.” That is what this lesson produces. And somewhere in America tonight, a teacher is downloading it for free and calling it history.

Slander with footnotes

They cannot teach kids to read a sentence, but they have found the time to teach them to resent their country.

Seven lessons about different centuries, different continents, different villains, but the same verdict typed up before a single student walks into the classroom. Columbus, the Founders, the Constitution, the Red Scare, the Black Panthers, the War on Terror, and the birth of Israel. A curriculum that arrives at the same conclusion no matter the subject isn’t teaching anyone how to think. It’s handing them what to think and trusting that fifteen-year-olds won’t notice the verdict was pre-determined by the lesson creator.

Look at what is demonized, because that’s the part the “social justice” packaging is designed to hide. Every lesson takes aim at a specific load-bearing wall of Western civilization. Columbus is convicted not as a man but as an agent of “oppressive” private property. The Constitution becomes a rigged contract written by the “privileged” one percent. The Panthers’ demand to seize “the means of production” is handed to 10^th graders as a template to copy.

The same three targets pop up every time: property ownership, capitalism, and the Constitution. Those aren’t side characters for the American way. They are the bedrock of the American experiment. The ZEP knows this. A generation taught to feel shame toward those institutions is a generation that won’t lift a finger to defend them. They’ll either join the revolution or stand by sympathetically as it happens. That’s what the ZEP wants for our America’s school children.

Here is another reason that should infuriate every parent, regardless of politics. Teachers are burning class hours on this while the country is in the middle of a genuine literacy collapse. On the 2024 Nation’s Report Card, about 40 percent of 4th graders scored below the most basic reading level, the highest percentage since 2002, and one in three 8th graders fell below basic, the worst result in the test’s history. Among high school seniors, 32 percent now read below basic. Two in five children can’t reliably understand a paragraph, and the response from the teachers who use the ZEP is to spend a week staging a mock trial of Christopher Columbus.

They cannot teach kids to read a sentence, but they have found the time to teach them to resent their country.

Imagine someone took your life and wrote down only the worst of it. Every dirty deed, every drunken night, every unkind word. Imagine they didn’t stop there. They exaggerated it, took your actions out of context, invented a few sins you never committed, and assembled the whole thing into the ugliest possible portrait of who you are. Then they handed that portrait to a room full of children and called it your biography.

That isn’t education. It’s slander with footnotes. And it is precisely what four decades of Zinn have handed America’s children in place of their inheritance. As the country turns 250, the genuinely radical act, the one Zinn spent his career arguing against, is to tell students the whole of it: the sin and the glory, the contradiction and the achievement. Teach them all of it, and they can be trusted to love this country with their eyes wide open, and to carry it through another 250 years.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/irredeemable-zinn-howard-zinns-miseducation-of-america/