Seriously? They actually teach that? If slavery was so “good” that whites “envied” the “freedom” of enslaved blacks, why were there so many abolitionists, and why the hell didn’t more whites fight for the right to become slaves instead of freeing them? Oh and racism was “caused” by the very people who fought to end slavery, not the people who fought to justify it? This is some kind of really weird bizarreo world racist stupidity. “The 5,000 Year Leap” and “The Making of America,” shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a public school history class, for any grade. Either that, or the teachers need to not use them as history textbooks and instead use them as an exercise in critical thinking skills and show their students how to spot nonsensical propaganda.

Elias Isquith has more,

Tea Party activists rally in front of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, June 19, 2013. (Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite)

The nonprofit Americans United for Separation of Church and State is calling out one of the oldest public charter schools in Arizona for using two books from crank and Glenn Beck favorite Cleon Skousen that promote racism and a Christian nationalist interpretation of American history, reports the Arizona Republic.

The school, Heritage Academy, is apparently using two of Skousen’s most popular books, “The 5,000 Year Leap” and “The Making of America,” in an attempt to educate its student body of the ways in which America was actually founded by hardcore Jerry Falwell-style Christian conservatives.

This is not the same thing as trying to indoctrinate children, however, claims Earl Taylor, the school’s founder and principal. “Our purpose is not to convert students to different religious views,” Taylor promised. “It is to show them that religion influenced what the Founders did.”

Worse still, some parts of the Skousen books being given to Heritage Academy’s students — and presented as textbooks, rather than historical documents — also depict American slavery in a racist and risibly sympathetic light.

Read more at Salon