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Books that ought to be burned

Not really burned, but nobody should be taking seriously. Textbooks are written by experts in the fields, ideally anyway. That does mean you can take into account potential biases. I myself have a good deal of suspicion of some populist/popular historians (Howard Zinn for example). But it doesn't mean you should get to write in your own instead and insist on them for everyone.

If you want your kids to learn that a bunch of warm hearted people dressed in sheets decided to stop lynching people who merely wanted to vote and that's what the civil rights movement consists of, and not a decades, if not centuries long struggle for relative equality in the eyes of the law involving many acts of terrorism and repression, bravery and sacrifices of people of all races (and a still unceasing struggle for relative tolerance within the eyes of human beings on the basis of meaningless criteria like skin colouration), I guess you are entitled to teach them that. You don't get to teach everybody else that because it is false.

Same thing on evolution. If you want your children to learn the "holes" in Darwin's theory, you are entitled to teach them that. If you've studied microbiology and evolutionary mutation well enough you might even be able to contribute something meaningful to that broader discussion on issues like punctuated equilibrium or the mechanical functions precisely that alter and act upon genes. But even the Supreme Court has basically said that the Creationist model of life has no place in a public school text because of that inconvenient establishment clause that the Constitution has in it. If you insist it must be taught, give me a philosophy class. The Bible is metaphysics and ethics. Not biology.

I can live with stuff like "this was a republic, not a democracy" because my reading of much of the Federalist papers reflects a fear that democracy resembles a mob too often and there seems to be a good deal of historical scholarship reflecting the desire of a ruling elite to maintain a position of power in a new order that would better legitimize such a status. But this is because I don't see how that helps "Republicans" over "Democrats". The Democratic party started out as the Democratic-Republicans, which is probably a more accurate reflection still of what we had/have, and a pretty good indication of why there's so little meaningful difference between the actual policies pursued by Democrats and Republicans while in office as compared to the supposed great rift in their rhetorical positions. It's not like if you are some white Southern conservative you should sit around trashing Thomas Jefferson on the basis that, horrors, he was a Democrat. I can live with people trying to claim McCarthy was pursuing some actual Communists as though they were traitors or dangers to American society (though they really should question the wisdom of his methods)

I can't live with stuff like that being pushed by a dentist however. Or preacher. And not somebody who has academic credentials in the discourse and study of history as a profession rather than a hobby. Nobody would take me seriously either as a historical scholar despite the dozens of history texts sitting on my shelves and dozens more in e-texts of some sort stored on my computer. I recognize the difference between myself and Schlesinger or even compared to the original documents of our history in Madison, Jefferson, Wilson, Paine, and Hamilton's own words on which many historians have based their claims and lives of professional and dedicated study. Bias is a filter. You can start to recognize it, look for facts that oppose it or are ignored to make conclusions but you can't make up your own reality and fact set instead in order to reject their conclusions. That won't fly in a social world with other people in it.

What really offends me though isn't the pushing of a particular worldview. It's that it is accompanied by an attitude like this "This critical-thinking stuff is gobbledygook". Yes obviously thinking and analytical thinking is useless. In a world when you are told everything you need to know and aren't supposed to deviate from it and find out that there are facts left out or ignored. It essentially argues that the entire basis of disagreement of such people isn't based in thinking at all. Which... makes one wonder what it was based on instead.