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Tuesday, May 31, 2005

The World's 10 Most Harmful Books ... as told by the Conservatives

Human Events, the online national conservative weekly, asked a slew of conservative scholars to name the 10 most harmful books of the 19th and 20th centuries. Some are no surprise – Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto, Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, but others puzzle me. They nominate the Kinsey Report and John Dewey’s 1916 book, Democracy and Education. They define it like this:

“In pompous and opaque prose, he disparaged schooling that focused on traditional character development and endowing children with hard knowledge, and encouraged the teaching of thinking “skills” instead. His views had great influence on the direction of American education--particularly in public schools--and helped nurture the Clinton generation.”

Other winners include Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by the liberal economist John Maynard Keynes.

This is why the conservatives win so often: they spend the time to sit around and think this stuff up! I’d like to see the liberal’s list of the 10 most harmful books. What would it include?

I found the reference on the blog Wonkette.

"But talk about your lack of diversity -- eight out of the ten books on the list were authored by white, Western males! Surely, the faith-based conservatives at Human Events aren't blaming the world's woes on them, are they? Everyone knows it's mostly women, minorities, and foreigners who've been screwing things up. "

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