Our fourth and final installment of our investigative series. Read Part Two and Part Three here.
Howard Zinn
Howard Zinn died in 2010.
His K–12 curriculum reach is bigger today than at any point during his lifetime.
You may not know the name, but your children’s teachers do. Zinn was a self-described democratic socialist whose 1980 book, A People’s History of the United States, retells the American story from Columbus forward as one unbroken record of crime against the powerless. It has sold more than two million copies. Matt Damon name-checked it in Good Will Hunting. It turns up on The Simpsons. In one episode of The Sopranos, Tony’s teenage son announces that his history teacher compared Christopher Columbus to the Serbian war criminal Slobodan Milošević, and when his father objects, the boy shrugs: “It’s the truth. It’s in my history book.”
That was written as a joke about how far the new history had spread. It stopped being a joke a while ago.
A 2024 American Historical Association study, based on a survey of more than 3,000 middle- and high-school history teachers across nine states, found that over one in four now uses Zinn Education Project materials in class.
The single most influential figure in American public-school history education is a man who has been dead for fifteen years, who described his own purpose as activism rather than scholarship, and who once named his goal as “the wiping out of national boundaries.”
The largest teachers union in the country has spent years putting his curriculum in front of teachers. And the lessons inside it are worse than the casual headline suggests.
Howard Zinn’s Legacy
Zinn’s 1980 book A People’s History of the United States reframed American history as a continuous record of crime against various groups. In 2008, two organizations called Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change launched the Zinn Education Project to turn his framework into K–12 lesson plans.
The National Education Association, which represents roughly three million teachers, has been the muscle behind that reach. InfluenceWatch documented in 2025 that the NEA has given the Zinn Education Project prime conference space at national gatherings, co-designed curriculum with its organizers, co-hosted the annual “Teach Truth Day” events, promoted ZEP lesson plans in official press releases and teacher handbooks, and described the materials in official communications as teaching history “accurately.”
The lessons are not abstract.
A 2024 American Historical Association study, based on a survey of more than 3,000 middle- and high-school history teachers across nine states, found that over one in four now uses Zinn Education Project materials in class.
What your child may be learning with curriculum the NEA calls “accurate”
That convicted cop-killers should be reconsidered as heroes.
The lesson Whose “Terrorism”?, written by Zinn Education Project co-director Bill Bigelow, asks middle- and high-school students to “examine the definition of ‘terrorism’” using fictional scenarios designed to lead them to apply the label to U.S. government actions and corporations. The accompanying Rethinking Schools framing teaches students that “war is terrorism” and that Christopher Columbus was the first European to “consciously introduce terrorism” into the hemisphere.
It is among the most-recommended lessons on the ZEP website by teachers, in their own words.
That Columbus was a genocidal criminal, and the Green New Deal is the climate curriculum for an eight-year-old.
That the October 7 attacks make sense if you understand the frustrations behind them.
The Rethinking Schools book Teaching Palestine, distributed at the NEA’s 2025 Conference for Social and Racial Justice, contains lessons instructing teachers to “simulate the apartheid system in Israel,” to help students “understand the frustrations that led to Oct. 7,” and to explain that “the leaders of the United States and Israel are committing a genocide in public.”
The book’s author writes that his materials helped one student “understand the frustrations that led to Oct. 7.”
That sentence was published as a teaching success.
Then the mass email went out
On October 9, 2025, the NEA sent an email to its roughly three million members. The subject was Indigenous Peoples’ Day resources.
It linked to a website called Palestine Remembered, which hosts an article arguing that Adolf Hitler “honored” a policy of allowing Jews to emigrate, that “the majority of German and Austrian Jewry were saved” because of him, and that he “may have been genuinely trying to avoid being forced into the ‘genocide option.’” The language is the article’s, not mine.
That is the article the National Education Association directed its members to.
After StopAntisemitism called attention to the email publicly, the NEA quietly removed the worst material from its website and blamed a third party. The Anti-Defamation League posted in response:
The ADL was no longer working with the NEA at the time. Three months earlier, in July 2025, the NEA had formally severed ties with the ADL, citing what it called the ADL’s insufficient commitment to “social justice and Palestinian liberation.”
What the union calls the teachers who deliver this curriculum
That language is on the union’s official leadership-training page right now.
How this serves the Chinese Communist Party
While the Zinn Education Project is not a Chinese Communist Party front, it is serving CCP goals.
China’s own published education strategy Beijing’s 2024–2035 master plan on education explicitly calls for expanding China’s “international influence” through education. The CCP’s domestic curriculum teaches Chinese students that Western liberal democracy is failing, that American power is in decline, and that the Chinese model is superior.
The ZEP, the NEA, and the AFT are already producing, free of charge, what a CCP influence operation would otherwise pay for: roughly 50 million American children being taught that their own country is illegitimate, that its enemies have a point, and that the appropriate posture toward American history is moral suspicion.
The ZEP, the NEA, and the AFT are already producing, free of charge, what a CCP influence operation would otherwise pay for: roughly 50 million American children being taught that their own country is illegitimate, that its enemies have a point, and that the appropriate posture toward American history is moral suspicion.
Those are the values the union now intends to embed in the AI tools that will personalize instruction for tens of millions of American public school students.
In that same speech, Weingarten announced a formal curriculum partnership between the American Federation of Teachers and an unelected international organization that holds its summer meetings in China.
The four parts of “The Closed Classroom” are free to all. Restore Childhood is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. We do not take advertising and we do not take money from the organizations or industries we cover. If this work matters to you, please share it and upgrade to a paid subscription.
G-d help us all. I know that, back in the nineties, when I was in college, being a teacher was looked down upon as a profession for losers; it was common to hear, "well, if I can't get into a good grad school, or get a good job, I can always teach." I am not sure when the teaching profession became denigrated in the public's mind, but, its denigration led to its degradation; if teaching is considered a last resort for losers, then losers are all that it will attract. And, people who feel like losers are full of resentment, and resentful people are very, very drawn to Marxist ideas, to hatred, and to destruction (if THEY can be the destroyers, of course). I also know that many teaching schools have been bought by Qatar, a nation that wants to destroy the West and Western values and replace it with Islamic theocracy. In, 1999, I took the California Basic Education Skills Test, so I could substitute teach; while I was waiting to enter the test room, I heard people say that it was their THIRD time taking the test, and that it was unfairly difficult. When I took the test, I was APPALLED. The most difficult math was fractions, the essay question was "Describe your favorite summer vacation;" and the spelling and vocabulary sections were third grade level, at best. I finished it in 20 minutes even though the time allotted was 2 hours. For some reason, we had to wait the full two hours to turn it in, and when the two hours were up, 1/3 of the class had not completed the exam, and about 1/2 were just finishing.
G-d help us all. I know that, back in the nineties, when I was in college, being a teacher was looked down upon as a profession for losers; it was common to hear, "well, if I can't get into a good grad school, or get a good job, I can always teach." I am not sure when the teaching profession became denigrated in the public's mind, but, its denigration led to its degradation; if teaching is considered a last resort for losers, then losers are all that it will attract. And, people who feel like losers are full of resentment, and resentful people are very, very drawn to Marxist ideas, to hatred, and to destruction (if THEY can be the destroyers, of course). I also know that many teaching schools have been bought by Qatar, a nation that wants to destroy the West and Western values and replace it with Islamic theocracy. In, 1999, I took the California Basic Education Skills Test, so I could substitute teach; while I was waiting to enter the test room, I heard people say that it was their THIRD time taking the test, and that it was unfairly difficult. When I took the test, I was APPALLED. The most difficult math was fractions, the essay question was "Describe your favorite summer vacation;" and the spelling and vocabulary sections were third grade level, at best. I finished it in 20 minutes even though the time allotted was 2 hours. For some reason, we had to wait the full two hours to turn it in, and when the two hours were up, 1/3 of the class had not completed the exam, and about 1/2 were just finishing.
https://hxlibraries.substack.com/p/from-gramsci-to-marcuse