Truth and exaggeration

Many homeschoolers use “Uncle Eric” history books, and I can see why: Author Richard Maybury’s writing is alive and full of fascinating specific detail.

For example, in World War II Maybury notes that Germans’ “desire for perfection crippled their ability to produce weapons in large numbers,” and he gives this example: “Americans realized that the average plane flew only a few weeks or months before it was shot up, so it would not last long enough to corrode. Painting cost a lot of money, time and labor, so Americans stopped doing it. … The German V-1 and V-2 missiles were able to fly only a single one-way mission. They were painted.”

And yet, parents should be aware of the dubious conclusions Maybury sometimes draws: “The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki frightened Russians so much that their attempt to overthrow the Kremlin—which was their only shield against the U.S.—evaporated. … If someone said to me, in the final analysis the World Trade Center was destroyed by Teddy Roosevelt and his cronies, I would have a hard time disagreeing.”

Maybury is also over-the-top in his anti-British bias: “For eight centuries, British were cut from the same mold as Hitler and Stalin. … The English did not wear the nifty uniforms that the Nazi SS did. … They just went out and killed anyone who got in their way.” Hmm. The British were ruthless at times, but they also built institutions in the countries they ruled, unlike other Europeans out for exploitation. Where British missionaries labored, education and health improved, and faith in Christ chased away evil spirits.

In rightfully criticizing Stalin’s tyranny, Maybury sometimes downplays Hitler’s: “Compared to the Soviet Socialists, the German Nazis were amateurs. At the maximum extent of his reach, Hitler controlled about 4 percent of the world. … The Soviet Socialists had already conquered 16 percent.” A comparison of population and industrial capacity would produce opposite results, but in an evil-to-evil matchup, both leaders were the world’s worst mass murderers ever—until Mao Zedong challenged and probably broke their record.

Still, Maybury in books such as Ancient Rome and World War I makes history come alive, and that’s no small feat. He accurately labels much of the world as “Chaostan.” In The Thousand Year War in the Mideast, he profoundly observes that our goal abroad should be “Liberty, not Democracy.” (He wrote that before the United States in Iraq pushed democracy on a country without the prerequisites for it.) Parents should read Uncle Eric books and help children distinguish between truth and exaggeration: We could label them PG, parental guidance needed.

Education Short Stops

Kevin Carey’s The End of College (Riverhead, 2015) has good specific detail on how advances in information technology and soaring costs for college are shaking up the world of higher education—and will put many institutions out of business.

Thomas Hagedorn’s Founding Zealots: How Evangelicals Created America’s First Public Schools, 1783-1865 (Christian History in America, 2013) debunks the myth that Horace Mann was the founder of American public schools: Hagedorn emphasizes the role of Midwestern evangelical Calvinist pastors and laymen who emphasized Bible-reading and moral teaching in the schools they created.

Todd Hartch’s The Prophet of Cuernavaca (Oxford, 2015) is a biography of renegade Catholic priest Ivan Illich: The left esteems him, but his anti-school ideas resonate well with the homeschool movement. Some schools hope to inspire creativity, so it’s useful to see why some inventors persevere. Gavin Weightman’s Eureka: How Invention Happens (Yale, 2015) has a strong chapter on the Wright brothers and other chapters on the invention of television, bar codes, personal computers, and mobile phones.

Short Answers to Big Questions About God, the Bible & Christianity, by Clinton Arnold and Jeff Arnold (Baker, 2015) is a useful quick reference work for teachers. (J. Budziszewski’s Ask Me Anything books are also useful in that regard.) —M.O.