HARM EL SHEIK, Egypt, Feb. 8 – Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, and Ariel Sharon, prime minister of Israel, held summit talks at this Egyptian resort on Tuesday – the highest-level meeting between the sides in four years – and declared a truce in hostilities.

Mr. Abbas said he and Mr. Sharon “have jointly agreed to cease all acts of violence against Israelis and Palestinians everywhere,” while Mr. Sharon said they “agreed that all Palestinians will stop all acts of violence against all Israelis everywhere, and in parallel, Israel will cease all its military activity against all Palestinians everywhere.”

Officials said Israel would also pull back its troops from five West Bank cities – Jericho, Bethlehem, Ramallah, Tulkarm and Qalqilya – in the next three weeks and stop the arrests and assassinations of top militants if they agree to put down their weapons.

There was an immediate reminder of the fragility of those declarations when spokesmen for the radical Palestinian group Hamas said the truce was not binding on them.

The summit meeting on the shores of the Red Sea was nonetheless filled with the symbolism of renewed hopes, as the Israeli and Palestinian leaders sat at a round table with their host, the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, and King Abdullah II of Jordan.

In the hall, the Israeli flag was displayed next to the Egyptian, Jordanian and Palestinian flags.

Israeli spokesmen gave their interpretations on Egyptian and Arab television stations, and both Egypt and Jordan announced that they would soon return their ambassadors to Israel.

Mr. Abbas and Mr. Sharon, in coordinated statements, spoke of a new “opportunity” for peace and calm, and of a new beginning – a chance “to disengage from the path of blood,” as Mr. Sharon put it, “and start on a new path.”

Mr. Abbas said, “The calm which will prevail in our lands starting from today is the beginning of a new era,” and he vowed to spare no effort “to protect this emerging opportunity for peace.”

Both avoided the word “cease-fire.” But if they succeed in turning this period of relative quiet into a real cessation of violence, followed by agreed moves to reduce the impact of Israeli occupation on the Palestinians and serious negotiations about peace, the day will mark an important turning point in relations. The speed with which Hamas expressed lack of cooperation was noteworthy.

In Beirut, a Hamas spokesman, Osama Hamdaneh, said the cease-fire “does not commit the Palestinian resistance” because it was not fully negotiated with Hamas and all Palestinian prisoners were not released.

In Gaza, another Hamas spokesman, Mushir al-Masri, said the Abbas declaration “expresses only the position of the Palestinian Authority and does not express the point of view of the factions,” and he insisted that “the summit hasn’t led to anything new, and the Israeli position hasn’t changed.”

Hamas has agreed to a temporary period of quiet, and its statements on Tuesday may be more rhetoric than substance, an effort to remind Palestinians that Hamas has been fighting the Israelis, not making concessions to them. But they are a sharp reminder of the limits of Mr. Abbas’s authority right now, even with the backing of Egypt and Jordan, and of the fragility of the declarations made Tuesday.

Israel has made it clear that if attacks do continue and Mr. Abbas does little to stop them, Israel will resume its military activity.

“One can only have a cease-fire with a state or authority that controls security,” a senior Israeli official cautioned here on Friday.

“You can’t have a cease-fire with armed terrorist groups, because you give them a veto over peace,” he added. “What we have today is a cessation of violence, and it can become something more if Abbas moves to crack down” on the militants, take away their weapons and destroy their mortar and rocket factories.

Mr. Abbas has not yet appointed a new cabinet or reformed his security forces, the Israelis point out, with one senior military official saying, “We know he needs time, and we will give him time, but he doesn’t have a limitless amount of time.”

Mr. Sharon, on only his second visit to an Arab country as prime minister – he commanded Israeli forces that took this resort in the Arab-Israeli war in 1973 – had a long and cordial meeting with Mr. Mubarak, whose aides talked of a visit to Israel. Mr. Sharon also invited Mr. Abbas to his farm for a working visit.

Mr. Abbas, who was elected president of the Palestinian Authority in January after the death of Yasir Arafat in November, said it was time for the Palestinians “to regain their freedom” and “put an end to decades of suffering and pain.” He promised Palestinians that they would live under “one authority, one weapon and political pluralism” – meaning an end to political chaos, armed gangs and resistance groups, and representation for Hamas and Islamic Jihad through democratic politics.

Mr. Abbas urged the Israelis to move quickly back to the peace plan called the road map sponsored by the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations. He called for serious negotiations about a final peace settlement. And he said the declarations made Tuesday, together with what will follow, are already important parts of the road map’s first stage.

“We want to replace the language of bullets and bombs with the language of dialogue, to have the language of dialogue instead of the wall,” Mr. Abbas said, referring to the barrier Israel is building in the West Bank that it says is to guard against suicide bombers. If there is a real cease-fire, pressure will mount on Israel to stop building the barrier, especially on Palestinian land.

But Israeli officials insisted that the Tuesday declarations still left the two sides in what one of them called a “pre-road map situation,” suggesting that Mr. Sharon was too vulnerable with his plan to pull Israeli settlers out of Gaza to be able to deal with more controversy over illegal settlements and outpost construction in the West Bank.

Israel, in other words, is insisting that Mr. Abbas implement his obligations to destroy the infrastructure of terrorism in the first stage of the road map before Israel begins to implement its own obligations to stop new settlement activity and dismantle up to 50 outposts erected after March 2001. Hamas’s statements on Tuesday are likely to solidify that Israeli position.

Mr. Abbas is working to co-opt Hamas and the other radicals by bringing them into democratic politics and negotiating a political role with them in return for an end to violence. His current foreign minister, Nabil Shaath, said Tuesday that Mr. Abbas “will explain to our brothers and to consolidate their adherence to the cease-fire.” But Mr. Shaath also warned that “from now on, any violation of the truce will be a violation of the national commitment and will have to be dealt with as such.”

But Israelis are not only skeptical that Mr. Abbas will crack down on Hamas, they also do not regard even a long truce as a substantive change in relations with the Palestinians until Hamas and the other militants are firmly under the control of a new, reformed Palestinian security force.

Still, quiet in Gaza will make it easier for Mr. Sharon to carry out his Gaza plan, both politically and militarily, because it will let the police and army dismantle the settlements and evacuate the settlers without being shot at. And quiet will make it much easier for Mr. Abbas to carry out his urgent domestic agenda of reform – of his own Fatah movement, of the security forces and of the Palestinian Authority itself.

The absence of an American mediator made the meeting seem, in a way, more important, because it was Cairo, not Washington, that had brought the sides together.

Speaking in Rome, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warned of a long road ahead. She acknowledged the limits of the Palestinian security forces, but said, “There are places where they can act.” When Palestinian forces arrest someone, they should hold him; when they see a bomb making facility, they should destroy it; and when they see smuggling, they should stop it, she said, in words that will cheer Mr. Sharon.

n 1991 David Yust clocked 22 hours staring at a forest of yellow umbrellas in a valley north of Los Angeles. He spent 13 days in Berlin in 1995 marveling at the aluminum-surfaced fabric that draped the Reichstag, once rising at 2 a.m. for a reverential photo session of the sun rising over the enfolded neo-Renaissance landmark. And next week he plans to photograph a saffron-cloaked Central Park at dawn.

Mr. Yust, 65, is part of a far-flung group of followers of the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, whose latest public art project, “The Gates,” is scheduled to open along 23 miles of the park’s pedestrian walkways on Saturday. These loyal fans plot distant vacations, organize group trips and sometimes abandon jobs to bear witness to the artists’ installations.

They are like the fans that long traipsed after the Grateful Dead, but with far fewer tour dates. They share the passion of people who collect milk glass, Manolo Blahniks or rare teapots, although their holdings are limited to books, pieces of fabric or, in the case of Caryl Unger, a shovel that was used to install “Surrounded Islands” in Biscayne Bay, off Miami.

Groupies? Gate-heads? They resist monikers. But their ardor for the Christo and Jeanne-Claude happenings is passionate.

Mr. Yust, an art professor at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, said he was first bitten by the Christo bug in 1983, when he signed on to work on “Surrounded Islands,” in which 11 Florida islands were encircled by pink floating fabric, after hearing the artists speak at the university. Since then he has tried to see as many of the installations as he can.

“I thought about that project every day for the next two years,” said Mr. Yust, who, like many of those who travel the country or world to see the team’s work, is an artist himself. “I thought he was a big nut at that time. And I still think he is a big nut. But I am totally supportive of what he and Jeanne-Claude do. I feel they are among the last of the true idealists on the planet.”

From art collectors to museum groups, tourists to paid Christo volunteers, the city expects 200,000 to flock to the city for the installation, which will remain through Feb. 27. Such figures, of course, are mere guesses for now. But there does seem to be universal agreement that in a traditionally slow tourism period, New York will draw record numbers of visitors, thanks to “The Gates.”

Hotels that are usually half full or worse this time of year are reporting strong bookings, especially at establishments that line the park’s perimeter. For the coming weekend, the Carlyle Hotel is 75 percent booked, a 30 percent increase over last year, said James McBride, the hotel’s managing director. The hotel is offering a “Gates” package, which includes a park-view suite with catering for two hours for 25 people, at $6,000. “We booked one of them already,” Mr. McBride said.

The Mark is sold out this weekend; last February, only half of the 176 rooms were booked, managers there said.

The artists estimate that thousands of people around the globe make a point of traveling to see their work, often signing on to help install the pieces. Smaller Christo communities hammer beams, tread water, twist fabric, answer phones or perform myriad other tasks to help bring a work together. There is even a blog on which visitors can record their reactions: nycgates.blogspot.com.

Those fans, as well as thousands of other visitors who are landing in New York over the next several days to behold the ornamented park, are expected to lift the city’s tourism economy, usually lackluster this time of year.

“You don’t go running up to New York in the middle of February from Miami,” said Mrs. Unger, who is flying in on Thursday from Miami to see the installation. “But when I heard it was going to be in New York, I said to my husband, ‘Please, let’s go.’ “

New York merchants, of course, hope the experience will be as remunerative as it is enriching. The Mandarin Oriental will offer a package including binoculars in each of its Central Park View rooms, as well as breakfast at Asiate and a Metropolitan Museum of Art book on the project, starting at $1,050 a night. La Prima Donna Restaurant will serve sautéed Prince Edward Island mussels, in a saffron cream sauce. You get the idea.

For the record, the artists do not earn income from the detritus left behind once a project is over. “The Gates” will be industrially recycled, and proceeds from the sale of “Gates” sweatshirts and other souvenirs will be donated to Nurture New York’s Nature and the Central Park Conservancy. The project, which will cost more than $20 million to install, will be paid for by the artists.

Organized groups are coming from Japan, Germany and many American cities to see the work, a great many of them made up of artists or art collectors.

Ruth Halperin, chairwoman of Contemporary Collectors Circle of the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, will fly in with 25 museum members on her fourth Christo trip.

“We went to Fresno to see the umbrellas,” said Ms. Halperin, who is 77. “We went to Paris, and we saw “Running Fence,” she said, referring to the draping of the Pont-Neuf in Champagne-colored cloth in 1985 and a 24-mile nylon curtain that stretched through Sonoma and Marin Counties in California in 1976. ” ‘Running Fence’ – to me that was the most beautiful one,” she said. “The hills were beautiful and soft, and the light as the wind blew was magic. I will never forget that for the rest of my life.”

About 100 hard-core fans live out their commitment by helping to assemble the projects. Iris Sandkuhler, an artist from San Francisco, has worked on seven Christo installations to date. “I did my first one as a teenager, and now I am in my 40′s,” Ms. Sandkuhler said. “In 1978, an art instructor in North Carolina piled us into a van and said you have to do this,” she said, describing her initiation, a modest Christo project involving the wrapping of some streets in Kansas City.

The commitment is not without its physical challenges. “Working in water in the Biscayne Bay,” she said, “we had to lace the panels together, and there was nothing to stand on, so we were in the water floundering around.”

“But the hardest one for me,” Ms. Sandkuhler mused, “was when I worked for them in Paris, and I was sleeping on a couch in the office right next to the bathroom.”

RUSSELS, Feb. 3 – Understandably perhaps, the European powers that once ruled much of Africa prefer to recall the “civilization” they bestowed over the abuses they committed. Yet, as Belgium is now discovering, alternative versions of history can resurface unexpectedly. Forty-five years after the Belgian Congo won its independence, a remarkable exhibition here has set off a critical re-examination of Belgium’s record in its only African colony.

That the show, “Memory of Congo: The Colonial Era,” is organized by the Royal Museum of Central Africa is itself surprising. This sprawling neo-Classical palace in the Tervuren suburb of Brussels was constructed in 1897 with profits from Congo. And even as Congo tumbled through civil war, dictatorship and more civil war in the years since independence, the museum has remained a symbol of the good works that Belgium brought to its “model colony.”

Four years ago, though, the museum’s new director, Guido Gryseels, decided that the time had come for modernization, not only of the building, but also of its philosophy. Concretely, he felt the institution could no longer ignore the darker aspects of Belgium’s rule of Congo, notably the brutal period between 1885 and 1908 when, as the Congo Free State, the territory was run as the personal property of Belgium’s King Leopold II.

The timing of Mr. Gryseels’ initiative, though, was not accidental. Although the atrocities committed by the Congo Free State were widely denounced in the early 20th century, Belgium chose to remember the more orderly colonial period from 1908 to 1960. Then, in 1999, Adam Hochschild’s “King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa” appeared in translation in Belgium. And suddenly this forgotten story again became topical.

Mr. Hochschild’s headline message – that some 10 million people died during Leopold’s direct rule of Congo – was in fact challenged by some Belgian historians, but the book nonetheless raised questions about Belgium’s selective memory. It was in this context, then, that Mr. Gryseels formed a committee of Belgian and Congolese scientists and historians to carry out an in-depth study of Congo’s colonial experience to prepare for this exhibition.

Since “Memory of Congo” opened on Feb. 3, the public, press and television responses to the show suggest that Belgians may after all be willing to discover a different memory of Congo. “It’s what we intended,” Mr. Gryseels said. “We kick off with broad information, and then it’s up the public to pick up the debate. Some people have said we haven’t gone far enough in treating colonial violence, but for our museum this is revolutionary.”

Certainly, the exhibition aims to cover more than atrocities, if only to place the more unsavory episodes in a broad context. And this enables the museum to illustrate Belgium’s introduction of medicine, agriculture, education, railroads and mining, as well as Christianity, to Congo. It notes, for instance, that at the time of independence, 40 percent of Congolese were literate, a figure surpassed at the time in Africa only by South Africa.

But this is the story that Belgians already know. What is new is its treatment of the Congo Free State, where the scramble to extract rubber from Congo’s jungles led to widespread abuse of villagers and uncounted deaths from disease and at the hands of militias in the pay of rubber exporters. While few visual records survive, the show includes photographs of victims of hand amputations by militias and a painting, sarcastically titled “Civilization in Congo,” in which a colonialist witnesses the whipping of an African.

Easier to find are documents related to denunciations of the violence by Edmund Morel, a British shipping agent who in 1904 formed the Congo Reform Association, and Roger Casement, a British consul (executed by Britain for treason during World War I), who also exposed forced labor in Congo. Helped also by the publication of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” in 1899, this protest movement led Leopold to sell his African property to the Belgian government in 1908.

One wall text prepared by the committee of experts asks the question: “Genocide in the Congo?” It argues that the estimate of 10 million killed, first mentioned by Morel, cannot be confirmed because reliable figures are not available for a population dispersed over a vast area. And while the committee accepts that Congo’s population fell by at least 20 percent in the half-century after 1875 – a result of violence and disease – it also rejects the charge of genocide.

But the protests by Morel and others did prompt Leopold – who never set foot in Congo – to dispatch an inquiry commission, which reported that abuse was rampant. “The commission concluded that the state administration and the contracting companies were implicated in atrocities, as were numerous militias who terrrorized the region,” the museum’s committee reports.

Perhaps more surprising to many Belgians, the show also casts the colonial period after 1908 in a less benign light. Forced labor, for instance, did not end until around 1930. The colonial administration left health and education to missionaries. Segregation, while officially denied, was widespread: in housing, transportation, schools and health clinics. City maps displayed here, for instance, clearly indentify white and African neighborhoods. From 1952, a few Congolese given “civil merit cards” enjoyed some privileges.

Meanwhile, the exhibition acknowledges, Belgium did not prepare the colony for independence: in 1960, Congo had only a tiny corps of university graduates and no experience in democracy. Within days of independence, chaos erupted, followed by Belgian and United Nations military intervention, the murder of the ousted Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba – with Belgian collusion – and civil war, until Mobutu Sese Seko seized power and began three decades of one-man rule in 1965.

Today’s continuing crisis in Congo, where ethnic and militia violence has taken tens of thousands of lives in the country’s east, is not addressed in the show, yet it has led some Congolese to view the colonial period more positively. “In the eyes of many Congolese, the colonial era now looks like a golden age,” said Isidore Ndaywel è Nziem, a Congolese historian and member of the committee of experts, “while Belgian opinion is going in the opposite direction and recognizing the crimes of the past.”

Still, Josette Shaje’a Tshiluila, the director of Congo’s national museums, welcomed Belgium’s willingness to exorcise its colonial past. “There are things that happened and must be presented as such,” she said at the show’s opening. “It’s the start of a real dialogue. We have shown that this is part of our shared history.”

Mr. Gryseels said he was particularly pleased by the reaction of many former colonialists, who in the past have felt hurt by criticism of their work in Congo. “They are coming to accept that there are parts of our past that are not full of glory,” the museum director said, adding that he expected their views to be echoed during a seminar on colonial violence in Congo to be held here May 12 and 13. The exhibition closes Oct. 9.

“There are still many questions left unanswered,” said Pierre de Maret, rector of the Free University of Brussels and a member of the committee of experts. “But it is worth noting that this is the first time that a former colonial power has had the courage to come to terms with its colonial past. I would like to see a conference organized in which all colonial powers address their past. This is only the beginning.”

hat Ellen MacArthur was craving after 71 days 14 hours 18 minutes 33 seconds of stressed-out solitude at sea was eye contact.

She received plenty of it yesterday as she returned to dry land in the English port of Falmouth after setting her sport’s latest speed record and further burnishing her status as a national icon in Britain.

Solo sailing is nowhere near as solitary as it used to be. There are Web cams and Internet links; satellite telephone conversations with friends, family, benefactors; and, most important for MacArthur’s race against the clock, meteorologists.

But as connected as MacArthur was as she skimmed over the oceans at a record pace in her 75-foot trimaran, it was all virtual companionship. To enjoy the true company of her fellow man and woman, she had to wait until she crossed the finish line late Monday night off the French coast of Brittany.

To grasp the true force of her latest exploit, MacArthur had to wait 14 more hours until she hopped up on a stage at the National Maritime Museum in Falmouth, with thousands of spectators in the mood to give her plenty of positive feedback.

Standing in front of the crowd with a microphone in her hand and tears starting to creep down her apple cheeks, the 5-foot-3 MacArthur looked even more vulnerable than usual, but the luminous red numbers on the digital clock behind her on stage were a testimony to her resiliency and energy.

“I had a clock not dissimilar to this one on board, and for 71 days 14 hours 18 minutes 33 seconds, I watched it tick away,” MacArthur said. “To see that clock there with the seconds not moving is absolutely, completely unbelievable. I’m so relieved, above all.”

Only two people have completed a single-handed circumnavigation of the planet in a multihull, which is a much more volatile, easy-to-capsize craft than the monohulls that MacArthur and others have used in the Vendée Globe round-the-world race.

The first to go around alone in a multihull was the Frenchman Francis Joyon, who took 72 days 22 hours 54 minutes 22 seconds last year. That record looked out of reach. Only a decade ago, Bruno Peyron needed 79 days to get around the world with a full crew in his supersized catamaran.

Though the 28-year-old MacArthur figured it might require two or more attempts to surpass Joyon, she rounded Cape Horn with a five-day lead on Joyon’s pace, then proceeded to lose much of that lead on the final leg home when the weather turned against her.

In the end, her edge on Joyon was slightly more than 32 hours, but she had a bigger edge in resources. Her celebrity – acquired through her second-place finish in the 2000 Vendée Globe race and her victory in the 2002 Route du Rhum – has allowed her the luxury of big budgets.

She has a sizeable team behind her, led by Mark Turner, the former sailor who has shaped MacArthur’s career and finances.

Joyon handled his own weather work. MacArthur used an American company. Her new trimaran, designed by Nigel Irons, was built with her strengths and weaknesses in mind, while Joyon’s multihull, originally built in the 1980′s, had to be refitted and refurbished for his barer-bones effort.

MacArthur’s voyage covered 27,353 miles, and she averaged 15.9 knots an hour and about four hours of sleep a night, nearly all of it coming in the form of naps of 20 to 30 minutes.

“There’s no doubt this trip has been harder than anything I’ve taken on before,” she said. “There were more pleasures to be found in the Vendée. This was exceptionally difficult, and it pushed me exceptionally hard, but there are always moments when the boat is sailing fantastic, and some days when the boat was just awesome and everything seemed right. And you get this huge buzz. You’re averaging 20 knots in the middle of nowhere on a boat who has your life in its hands.”

The daughter of school teachers, MacArthur was raised in landlocked Derbyshire, England, and saved most of her meal money from school for eight years to buy her first boat. Becoming fluent in French, she is that rare public figure who can speak to sensibilities on each side of the channel as well as to sponsors on each side. But the British, with their grand maritime tradition, were in no mood to share Tuesday.

She was soon joined on stage in Falmouth by Sir Robin Knox-Johnston, another British icon who returned to this same port when he became the first person to sail around the world on his own without stopping in 1968 and 1969.

“A year ago, a very tough, determined Frenchman put the single-handed record out of sight, and we all thought it would be there for 10 years, but today, this little slip of a thing has come charging back,” Knox-Johnston told the crowd, before shifting his gaze back to MacArthur.

“You’ve managed to put us back on the sailing map,” he said, “and I think we’re all terribly grateful.”

here is one satiric touch missing from Jon Stewart’s mock textbook, ”America (the Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction”: a sticker. I mean the kind that was stuck on science textbooks in Cobb County, Ga. (until a judge ordered the warnings about evolution removed). Stewart and his ”Daily Show” accomplices could use the same device to warn their readers about the premise of their book, which is that American democracy has gone downhill. ”Devolution,” they might say, ”is a theory, not a fact, regarding the course of human — in particular American — events. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered.”

Pasted over the private parts of the naked Supreme Court justices on Page 99, such a tasteful advisory might have won over Wal-Mart, which has refused to sell the book in its stores. The Jackson-George Regional Library System in Mississippi might not have bothered with its brief ban. Nobody would have to worry about students peeling off the stickers, either. The nether-regions of ”nine feeble old people” are not a turn-on for young people.

Meanwhile, a decade after Lynne Cheney denounced the government-financed National Standards for United States History as ”politically correct to a fare-thee-well,” a book called ”The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History” has lately joined Stewart’s book on the best-seller lists (though many rungs below). The endless fight over how and what to teach kids about America shows no sign of flagging — and students are still flunking. On a recent assessment test, only about 10 percent of high-school seniors scored at a ”proficient” level in history. The arrival of a Comedy Central star to set them straight sounds like a joke out of, well, ”The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” the parodic newscast that now attracts a larger audience of 18- to 34-year-olds than the network news shows do.

But don’t underestimate the comedian who recently received credit for helping to rid the world of ”Crossfire.” With a sendup of social-studies textbooks that is not merely for students, Stewart and the ”Daily Show” satirists have a lesson for champions of ”civic renewal”: thanks to all the partisan pugilism, kids are being served sanitized pablum in school — and that’s hardly a recipe for energizing our citizenry.

”The Daily Show” trademark is the opposite of bland, of course. The show goes in for an earnestly antic pox-on-both-your-houses style, and so does the primer. On the one hand, ”America (the Book)” invites denunciation as a revisionist plot to denigrate the nation — bait that traditionalists have risen to at least since Lynne Cheney attacked that 1994 report on standards as a leftist travesty of America’s great figures and aspirations. There are those naked justices, to take one example. Or this ”classroom activity”: ”Using felt and yarn, make a hand puppet of Clarence Thomas. Ta-da! You’re Antonin Scalia!” For a White House that has lately been plugging a patriotic ”We the People” campaign to strengthen history education — complete with ”Heroes in History” lectures — this is red (or rather blue) meat.

On the other hand, ”America (the Book)” mocks left-wing pieties, too. ”Look in the Bill of Rights for the amendment that makes specific reference to each of the following,” instructs one assignment; among the choices: a) Affirmative action; b) Partial-birth abortions. The satirists dismantle a pedagogical approach to American studies shaped by assiduous multiculturalism and make-a-diorama-style mollycoddling. Sensibly enough, their tack isn’t to get irate, but to get ironic. For their youthful target audience, who are products of diverse classrooms and consciousness-raising curricula, fraught identity politics are passe. It’s time to get beyond them.

So Stewart and his compatriots aren’t just kidding when they say ”go out there and make your Fathers proud.” That’s as in ”founding fathers,” an f-word you won’t find in some of the nation’s major textbooks, thanks to a decade of tendentious revisionism from left and right. As Diane Ravitch reports in ”The Language Police,” censors have gutted textbooks of narrative complexity and references that could be deemed biased. The upshot is an A.D.H.D.-inducing patchwork of textual vacuity and graphic gimmickry, which ”America (the Book)” perfectly mimics — even as it flouts all the prohibitions it can. These authors aren’t worried about being called ageist, racist, sexist (”The Founding . . . MOTHERS?!?”), much less liberal or traditionalist. They hail the framers as ”men of genius” while taking a dig at the ”more rigorous standards” of today that would render them ”unelectable.” Counting on readers informed enough to get the jokes, Stewart et al. can be hard graders: ”Come on, you don’t know who this is? It’s F.D.R.!”

Yet these satirists are definitely on the kids’ side. In one of the Insta-Poll boxes that litter ”America (the Book),” the authors ask, ”Do these constant distractions from the actual text have you considering returning this book for . . . ” — readers can choose between ”cash” and ”store credit.” But it’s real textbooks that are a waste of time and money — not just because they’re dizzying, or because they belittle, say, Benjamin Franklin (who merely ”dabbled in science and politics,” according to my kids’ middle-school textbook, ”America: Pathways to the Present”). The ”Daily Show” satirists are on to the deeper problem: the reductive, defensive spirit that pervades the whole textbook endeavor, with traditionalists and revisionists alike trapped into totting up inches devoted to Liliuokalani versus Lincoln. It’s readers who are truly short-changed, left too ill informed to recognize a book like ”The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History” for what it is: tendentious, not serious, history. ”Civic renewal” may be too much to hope for, but if ”America (the Book)” maintains its lead on the best-seller lists, foes of devolution should be pleased.