Lies my teacher told me

That's the title of an excellent book by James Loewen, about history and the way it is taught in our schools. I read it some years ago, and at the time, I focused on the history itself. I learned quite a lot, as I think most Americans would.

Take Christopher Columbus, whose initial voyage across the Atlantic is told in melodramatic and almost entirely fictional detail in most textbooks. Columbus was in fact well equipped for the journey, he enjoyed excellent weather, there was no threat of mutiny, he (and everyone else) knew the world was round, etc. As for his subsequent journeys and the violence and eventual genocide his men committed against the Arawak and other peoples, well, the textbooks have little to say. A contemporary of Columbus', the historian Bartolome de Las Casas, wrote: "What we committed in the Indies stands out among the most unpardonable offenses ever committed against God and mankind." But you won't find descriptions of such offenses in American schoolbooks.

Loewen has a larger point, besides correcting misinformation. He asks: How do we get such bad textbooks? Why is history taught as a series of boring, disconnected, and whitewashed details to be memorized (and shortly thereafter, forgotten)? And whose interest is served?

Loewen says (pp. 12-13) that high school students usually say history is their least favorite subject, and that when ranking 21 high school subjects from most to least relevant, students rank history dead last. And yet, historical novels are often bestsellers, historical movies usually do well (Dances with Wolves, JFK, etc), PBS series such as Roots, Eyes on the Prize and The Civil War were incredibly popular, and The National Museum of American History is among the three most popular Smithsonian museums. As Loewen puts it:

Our situation is this: American history is full of fantastic and important stories. These stories have the power to spellbind audiences, even audiences of difficult seventh-graders.... American audiences, even young ones, need and want to know about their national past. Yet they sleep through the classes that present it.

What has gone wrong?

We begin to get a handle on this question by noting that the teaching of history, more than any other discipline, is dominated by textbooks.

Fast forward to page 272:

Ten chapters have shown that textbooks supply irrelevant and even erroneous details, while omitting pivotal questions and facts in their treatments of issues from Columbus' second voyage to the possibility of impending ecocide....

Despite criticisms by scholars... new editions of old texts come out year after year, largely unchanged. Year after year, clones appear with new authors but nearly identical covers, titles, and contents. What explains such appalling uniformity? The textbooks must be satisfying somebody.

On page 288 Loewen explains that many textbook publishers provide the whole package: text, videos, lesson plans, quizzes and tests. And of course the texts themselves provide the key definitions, the review questions, the discussion points. Thus a handful of textbook publishers control the vast majority of all teaching of history to our schoolchildren.

Loewen quotes two researchers, William L. Griffen and John Marciano, who analyzed how history texts presented the Vietnam War (p. 275):

Textbooks offer an obvious means of realizing hegemony in education.... By hegemony we refer specifically to the influence that dominant classes or groups exercise by virtue of their control of ideological institutions, such as schools, that shape perception on such vital issues as the Vietnam War.... Within history texts, for example, the omission of crucial facts and viewpoints limits profoundly the ways in which students come to view history events. Further, through their one-dimensionality textbooks shield students from intellectual encounters with their world that would sharpen their critical abilities.

Or, as Loewen summarizes it, "...the controlling elements of our society keep crucial facts from us to keep us ignorant and stupid." He goes on-- please excuse the lengthy quotes, but I think this is a fascinating paragraph:

Most scholars of education share this perspective, often referred to as "critical theory". Jonathan Kozol is of this school when he writes, "School is in business to produce reliable people." Paulo Freire of Brazil puts it this way: "It would be extremely naive to expect the dominant classes to develop a type of education that would enable subordinate classes to perceive social injustices critically." Henry Giroux, Freire's leading disciple in the United States, maintains, "The dominant culture actively functions to suppress the development of a critical historical consciousness among the populace." David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot tell us when this all started: between 1890 and 1920 businessmen came to have by far a greater impact on public education than any other occupational group or stratum. Some writers on education even conclude that upper-class control makes real improvement impossible. In a critique of educational reform initiatives, Henry M. Levin stated, "The educational system will always be applied toward serving the role of cultural transmission and preserving the status quo." "The public schools we have today are what the powerful and the considerable have made of them," wrote Walter Karp. "They will not be redeemed by trifling reforms."

However, Loewen himself does not entirely buy into the above synopsis of what is wrong with the teaching of history. He criticizes the system in which state committees must approve textbooks before they can be purchased by school districts, and therefore publishers want to please everyone all the time, resulting in bland, all-inclusive texts (all-inclusive when it comes to petty details, anyway), which avoid controversy or conflict. (Here is another problem with increasing centralization in our schools.)

Whatever the cause of our boring history texts, I believe that it serves whoever is in power for the population to be ignorant of history. I am convinced of this because of my own experience in reading Howard Zinn's The People's History of the United States. If I had to summarize what I learned from that book in one sentence, it would be this: "The less privileged classes will not win anything from those in power without a fight, but it is a fight they can and do win." This is not a message the powers that be want us learning. They want to tell the story of Great Men who committed Great Acts and suggest that collective action by the public plays little to no role.

It will suffice, however, if we simply know as little history as possible.