Alice Moore opened parents’ eyes to liberal indoctrination in textbooks
Robert Knight
The Washington Times
10/10/2011
As a school board member in Kanawha County, W.Va., in the early 1970s, Alice Moore ignited what might be considered the opening battle of America’s culture war in education.
Mrs. Moore challenged the board’s choice of textbooks and supplementary materials, touching off a yearlong protest that riveted the nation in 1974. Among other things, it alerted parents that the educational establishment was not only anti-Christian but aggressively so. The uprising presaged today’s Tea Party revolt against overbearing government.
Thousands took to the streets, miners went on strike, and several unoccupied schools were bombed. One person was critically hurt when shot by a man who opposed the book protesters. A pastor who led the protests, Marvin Horan, was convicted on one count of conspiracy and spent three years in prison, denying he had anything to do with violence. The Ku Klux Klan crashed the party, and book protesters spent much effort distancing themselves.
“The Great Textbook War,” a radio documentary by former Kanawha County resident Trey Kay, won a Peabody Award in 2009 for its “thoughtful, balanced” approach to the conflict, as well as an Edward R. Murrow Award in 2010. Several books have been written about the topic, including “Protester Voices: The 1974 Textbook Tea Party,” by Karl C. Priest, who taught for 34 years in West Virginia schools.
On Oct. 7, Mrs. Moore received the Dr. Robert Dreyfus Courageous Christian Leadership Award from South Carolina-based Frontline Ministries and the Exodus Mandate Project, which encourages parents to home-school their children or put them in Christian schools. Dr. Dreyfus is a longtime home-schooling proponent…
…The media and leftist groups called Mrs. Moore, some pastors, teachers and parents “book burners” and “racists.” It didn’t matter that Mrs. Moore’s mentor in the challenge was Arizona’s black state school board president, Stephen S. Jenkins, who alerted her to the leftist agenda behind multiculturalism, and that some books portrayed blacks in extremely negative ways.
Mrs. Moore’s side was deemed “censors” even though they obtained copies of the challenged texts so people could read for themselves. Contrast this with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who said of the massive Obamacare bill, “we have to pass it so you can find out what’s in it.”
The upshot of the protests, which drew network coverage after the miners’ strike began, was that eight books were dropped and 65 percent to 80 percent of elementary school parents opted out of using the approved texts. Publishers discontinued some of the books as news of their content spread across the country…
…From the powerful national teachers unions to academia, what former U.S. Education Secretary William Bennett calls “the blob” is clearly on the side of the radical left. The U.S. Department of Energy has even created a school curriculum called Solar Decathlon, which tells kids that solar power is moral, unlike the evil oil and gas industries…
If parents think their schools are safe, they’re whistling in the dark. In Virginia’s Loudoun County, the most conservative in the Washington area, School Board Chairman John Stevens boasted recently to The Washington Post Magazine that after a 2008 library challenge to the homosexual penguin book “And Tango Makes Three,” more copies are available because of donations by families – including his…
Read the complete article at The Washington Times.
