'Howard Zinn Read-In' Celebrates Power of 'Dangerous' Education

[unhappycamper]

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/11/05-6



&quot A People's History of the United States) is dangerous because it presents a perspective that ordinary people can change the world, which is the main secret that the richest 1% and their political advocates cannot allow young people to find out." –Jesse Hagopian, high school history teacher

'Howard Zinn Read-In' Celebrates Power of 'Dangerous' Education
- Andrea Germanos, staff writer
Published on Tuesday, November 5, 2013 by Common Dreams

In organizing a Howard Zinn read-in at Purdue University, students have cultivated what is described as an "imaginative and defiant response to the corporate attack on our students and our schools."

Controversy flared the summer when the Associated Press revealed that Mitch Daniels, former Indiana Governor and now Purdue University president, attempted to censor Howard Zinn's classic A People’s History of the United States from Indiana classrooms. As Zinn Education Project co-director Bill Bigelow told Common Dreams, "When Governor Mitch Daniels attempted to prevent teachers and teacher educators from using Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, this was an attack on academic freedom and on students' right to learn a fuller, more honest history than is found in their textbooks."

But Daniels' efforts to censor the classic work already backfired, instead sparking a surge in public interest in the late historian's work just a month after Daniels' 'Zinn witch-hunt' was revealed.

The censorship controversy also provided the impetus for the Howard Zinn read-in taking place at Purdue on Tuesday.



unhappycamper comment: If you haven't read Zinn's "A People’s History of the United States", I'd recommend you do; you will find a ton of things that are longer taught in many American schools.