As has been amply demonstrated by others, Howard Zinn was an anti-American secular humanist with heavily Marxist leanings.  As I have already written, teaching the Zinn Education Project in public schools likely violates the California education code.  It discriminates against particular races (namely, non-minorities) and all traditional religion (particularly with regard to its view of homosexuality).  Zinn himself called for violating the education codes wherever possible:

“Don’t obey the rules… you have to play a kind of guerrilla warfare with the establishment in which you try not to be fired… You have to depart from the curriculum… outside the lines that are set for us by the school administration, or the politicians.”

Howard Zinn

Of course, that doesn’t stop schoolteachers everywhere from teaching Zinn.  According to the Oxnard Union High School District, Zinn’s on the California Department of Education Recommended Reading List.

He’s taught at the San Lorenzo Unified School District Re-Entry Intervention Program, which targets kids coming back to school after being expelled, students with ten or more days of suspension who are on track for expulsion, students coming back to school from Juvenile Hall – in short, the worst of the worst.  This makes perfect sense – after all, what better way is there to teach borderline-criminal kids about good citizenship than pillorying America and giving them delusions of victimhood?

He’s taught in the Los Angeles Unified School District, at the Stern Math and Science School, where teacher Benjamin Weber’s curriculum is designed to focus on various minority groups struggling against the repressive evil of the American system.

He’s taught throughout the Seattle School District; in 2002, pressure from liberal interest groups forced the school district to adopt Zinn’s work in a stated attempt to include “cultural diversity” in the curriculum.  Not coincidentally, the district came up with an action plan that included “more aggressive recruitment of minority teachers, better training of teachers about students’ varied cultural backgrounds, and racially proportionate admissions of students to special education and ‘highly capable’ programs.”  He’s also taught in the Philadelphia School District, which recommends all of his books.

The list goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on.

Our public schools can’t get kids to read, write or do math.  But they can teach them to be victims, to hate religion, and to despise America’s history.

There’s no question that teaching Zinn violates school codes all over the country.  The truth is that it should also violate current understanding of the First Amendment Establishment Clause.

First, the Establishment Clause.  The Establishment Clause provides that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”  The original meaning of this clear dictate has been obscured by a century of bad Supreme Court law, so there’s no reason to go into it.  Instead, let’s focus on what the Supreme Court currently says the Establishment Clause means.  Under Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971), state and federal governments have no business participating in any activity unless (1) the action has a secular legislative purpose; or (2) it does not have the primary effect of either advancing or inhibiting religion; or (3) it does not result in “excessive government entanglement” with religion.  The easy argument here is that Zinn’s Education Project has a primary effect of inhibiting religion – as I’ve explained in the past, the Project targets religion in particularly pernicious ways.

But there’s another argument that deserves an airing here.  That is the argument that Zinn’s form of propaganda truly amounts to religious proselytizing.  Read the rest of the piece at BigHollywood.