Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus: What Your History Books Got Wrong (39 page)

peoples and cultures: savagery-barbarism-civilization, for example, or gath ering-hunting-horticultural-agricultural-industrial. Under the influence of these schemes, scholars completely misconceived “primitive” humans as living lives that, as Hobbes put it, were “nasty, brutish, and short,” Only “higher” cultures were conceived of as having sufficient leisure to develop art, literature, or religion.

Anthropologists have long known better. “Despite the theories traditionally taught in high school social studies,” pointed out anthropologist Peter Farb, “the truth is, the more primitive the society, the more leisured its way of life.”42 Thus “primitive” cultures were hardly “nasty.” As to “brutish,” we might recall the comparison of the peaceful Arawaks on Haiti and the Spanish conquistadors who subdued them. “Short” is also problematic. Before encountering the diseases brought by Europeans and Africans, many people in Australia, the Pacific islands, and the Americas probably enjoyed remarkable longevity, particularly when compared with European and African city dwellers. “They live a long life and rarely fall sick,” observed Giovanni da Verrazano, after whom the Verrazano Narrows and bridge in New York City are named.4J “The Indians be of lusty and healthful bodies not experimentally knowing the Catalogue of those health-wasting diseases which are incident to other Countries,” according to a very early New England colonist, who apparently ignored the recently introduced European diseases that were then laying waste the Native Americans. He reported that the Indians lived to “three-score, four-score, some a hundred years, before the world's universal summoner cites them to the craving Crave,”44 In Maryland another early settler marveled that many Indians were great-grandfathers, while in England few people survived to become grandparents.45 The first Europeans to meet Australian aborigines noted a range of ages that implied a goodly number lived to be seventy. For that matter, Psalm 90 in the Bible implies that thousands of years ago most people in the Middle East lived to be seventy: “The years of our lives are three score and ten, and if by reason of strength they be four score, yet is their labor sorrow.”

Besides fostering ignorance of past societies, belief in progress makes students oblivious to merit in present-day societies other than our own. To conclude that other cultures have achieved little about which we need to know is a natural side effect of believing our society the most progressive. Anthropology professors despair of the severe ethnocentrism shown by many first-year college students. William A, Haviland, author of a popular anthropology textbook, says that in his experience the possibility that “some of the things that we aspire to todayequal treatment of men and women, to cite but one examplehave in fact been achieved t>y some other peoples simply has never occurred to the average beginning undergraduate,”47 Few high schools offer anthropology courses, and fewer than one American in ten ever takes a college anthropology course, so we can hardly count on anthropology to reduce ethnocentrism. High school history and social studies courses could help open students to ideas from other cultures. That does not happen, however, because the idea of progress saturates these courses from Columbus to their final words. Therefore they can only promote, not diminish, ethnocentrism. Yet ethnocentric faith in progress in Western culture has had disastrous consequences. People who believed in their society as the vanguard of the future, the most progressive on earth, have been all too likely to indulge in such excessive cruelties as the Pequot massacre, Stalin's purges, the Holocaust, or the Great Leap Forward.

Rather than assuming that our ways must be best, textbook authors would do well to challenge students to think about practices from the American way of birth to the American way of death. Some elements of modem medicine, for instance, ate inarguably more effective and based on far better theory than previous medicines. On the other hand, our “scientific” antigravity way of birth, which dominated delivery rooms in the United States from about 1930 to 1970, shows the influence of the idea of progress at its most laughable. The analogy for childbirth was an operation: the doctor anesthetized the mother and removed the anesthetized infant like a gall bladder,48 Even as late as 1992, only half of all women who gave birth in U.S. hospitals breastfed their babies, even though we now know, as “primitive” societies never forgot, that human milk, not bovine milk or “formula,” is designed for human babies.49 IF history textbooks relinquished their blind devotion to the archetype of progress, they could invite readers to assess technologies as to which have truly been progressive. Defining progress would itself become problematic. Alternative forms of social organization, made possible or perhaps even necessary by technological and economic developments, could also be considered. Today's children may see the decline of the nation-state, for instance, because the problem of the planetary commons may force planetary decision-making or because growing tribalism may fragment many nations from within.5" The closing chapters of history textbooks might become inquiry exercises, directing students toward facts and readings on both sides of such issues. Surely such an approach would prepare students for their six decades of life after high school better than today's mindlessly upbeat textbook endings,

Thoughtfulness about such matters as the quality oflife is often touted as a goal of education in the humanities, but history textbooks sweep such topics under the brightly colored rug of progress. Textbooks manifest no real worries even about the environmental downside of our economic and scientific institutions. Instead, they stress the fortunate adequacy of our government's reaction. “As time went on, scientists discovered more about the effects of pollutants on the environment, and people became more concerned with environmental health,” says The American Tradition. “In response, Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969.” Textbook authors seem much happier telling of the governmental responsemainly the creation of the Environmental Protection Agencythan discussing any continuing environmental problems. Life and Liberty goes the furthest; it prophesies, “During the next 20 years, the environment will become a major political issue,” and goes on to discuss water shortages, acid rain, and tropical deforestation. But even Lift and Liberty ends its discussion: “Let us be optimistic. Our difficulties of energy and resource shortages will be solved within the next half century.” The authors then speculate happily about such wonders as shorter work weeks, robot workers, lunar colonies, and synthetic foods.

“The American people have reason to move into the future with confidence,” Triumph of the American Nation assures students in its final paragraph, for “the same scientific genius and engineering talents that unknowingly created many of the as yet unsolved problems remain available to solve them.”51 Students find these words about as inspirational as the photograph that accompanies them: John S. Herrington in a business suit. Herrington, you remembersurely you remember?-was secretary of energy in the Reagan administration. Many students no longer believe that Herrington or all our “scientific genius and engineering talents” will save us. According to a 1993 survey, children are much more concerned about the environment than are their parents,52 In the late 1980s about one high school senior in three thought that nuclear or biological annihilation will probably be the fate of all mankind within their lifetimes,53 “I have talked with my friends about this,” a student of mine wrote in her class journal. “We all agree that we feel as if we are not going to finish our adult lives.” These students had all taken American history courses, but the textbooks' regimen of good cheer does not seem to have rubbed off on them. Students know when they are being conned. They sense that underneath the mindless optimism is a defensiveness that rings hollow. Or maybe they simply never reached the cheerful endings of their textbooks.

Probably the principal effect of the textbook whitewash of environmental issues in favor of the idea of progress is to persuade high school students that American history courses are not appropriate places to bring up the future course of American history.54 What is perhaps the key issue of the day will have to be discussed in other classes-maybe science or healtheven though it is foremost a social rather than biological or health issue. Meanwhile, back in history class, more bland, data-free assurances that things are getting better.

E. ]. Mishan has suggested that feeding students rosy tales of automatic progress helps keep them passive, for it presents the future as a process over which they have no control." I don't believe this is why textbooks end as they do, however. Their upbeat endings may best be understood as ploys by publishers who hope that nationalist optimism will get their books adopted. Such endings really amount to concessions of defeat, however. By implying that no real questions about our future need be asked and no real thinking about trends in our history need be engaged in, textbook authors concede implicitly that our history has no serious bearing on our future. We can hardly fault students for concluding that the study ofhistory is irrelevant.

I do not know if there is any other field of knowledge which suffers so badly as history from the sheer blind repetitions that occur year after year, and from book to book.

Herbert ButterfieW When you're publishing a book, if there's something that is controversial, it's better to take it out.

Holt, Rinehart, and Winston representative There is no other country in the world where there is such a large gap between trie sophisticated understanding of some professional historians and the basic education given by teachers.

Marc Ferro

Lies My Teacher Told Me

11. Why Is History Taught Like This?

Ten chapters have shown that textbooks supply irrelevant and even erroneous details, while omitting pivotal questions and facts in their treatments of issues ranging from Columbus's second voyage to the possibility of impending ecocide. We have also seen that history textbooks offer students no practice in applying their understanding ofthe past to present concerns, hence no basis for thinking rationally about anything in the future. Reality gets lost as authors stray further and further from the primary sources and even the secondary literature. Textbooks rarely present the various sides of historical controversies and almost never reveal to students the evidence on which each side bases its position. The textbooks are unscholarly in other ways. Of the twelve I studied, only the two inquiry textbooks contain any footnotes.4 Six of the textbooks even deny students a bibliography.

Despite criticisms by scholars, from Frances FitzGerald to Diane Ravitch and Harriet Tyson-Bernstein,5 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.

Publishers produce textbooks with several audiences in mind. One is their intended readers: students' characteristics, as publishers perceive them, particularly affect reading level and page layout. Historians and professors of education are another audience, perhaps two audiences. Teachers comprise another. Conceptions of the general public also enter publishers' thinking, since public opinion influences adoption committees and since parents represent a potential interest group that publishers seek not to arouse. Some of these groups have not been shy about what they want textbooks to do. In 1925 the American Legion declaimed that the ideal textbook:

must inspire the children with patriotism. ... must be careful to tell the truth optimistically. . . .

must dwell on failure only for its value as a moral lesson, must speak chiefly of success must give each State and Section full space and value for the achievements of each.

Shirley Engle and Anna Ochoa are longtime luminaries of social studies education who in 1986 voiced their recommendations for textbooks. From their vantage point, the ideal textbook should:

confront students with important questions and problems for which answers are not readily available;

be highly selective; be organized around an important problem in society that is to be studied in depth; utilize . . . data from a variety of sources such as history, the social sciences, literature, journalism, and from students' first-hand experiences.'

Today's textbooks hew closely to the American Legion line and disregard the recommendations of Engle and Ochoa. Why?

Is the secondary literature in history to blame? We can hardly expect textbook authors to return to primary sources and dig out facts that are truly obscure. A few decades back, the secondary literature in history was quite biased. Until World War II history, much more than the other social sciences, was overtly anti-Semitic and antiblack. According to Peter Novick, whose book That Noble Dream is probably the best account of the history profession in this century, looking at every white college and university in America, exactly one black was ever employed to teach history before I945!8 Most historians were males from privileged white families. They wrote with blinders on. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., found himself able to write an entire book on rhe presidency of Andrew Jackson without ever mentioning perhaps the foremost issue Jackson dealt with as president: the removal of Indians from the Southeast. What's more, Schlesinger's book won the Pulitzer prize!'

These days, however, the secondary literature in American history is much more comprehensive. About the plagues, for example, Herbert U Williams wrote “The Epidemic of the Indians of New England, 1616-1620,” way back in 1909, and Esther W. Stearn and Allen E. Stearn wrote The Effect ofSrndUpnx on the Destiny of the Amerindian in 1945. P. M. Ashburn's classic The Ranks of Death: A Medical History ofthe Conquest ofAmerica came out in 1947. In 1 John Duffy wrote “Smallpox and the Indians in the American Colonies.”“1 For that matter, the most famous of all primary sources on the Pilgrims, William Bradford's Of Plimoth Plantation, clearly discloses the plagues. So we cannot excuse history textbooks on the grounds that the historical literature is inadequate. The facts about Helen Keller are hardly obscure, either. No dusty newspaper archives need be searched. The truth about W oodrow W ilson's interventions and his racism has also been available in scholarly works for decades, although most biographies of the man ignore it. Indeed, every chapter of this book has been based on commonly available research. Competent historians will find nothing new here. The information is all there, in the secondary literature, but has not made its way into our textbooks, media, or teachertraining programs and therefore hasn't reached our schools. As a consequence, according to comparative historian Marc Ferro, the United States has wound up with the largest gap of any country in the world between what historians know and what the rest of us are taught.”

Could these omissions be a question of professional judgment? Authors cannot include every event. The past is immense. No book claims to be complete. Decisions must be made. What is important? What is appropriate for a given age level? Perhaps teachers should devote no time at all to Helen Keller, no matter how heroic she was.

But when we look at what textbooks do includewhen we contemplate the minute details, some of them false, that they foist upon us about Columbus, fot example-we have to think again. Constraints of time and space cannot be causing textbooks to leave out any discussion of what Columbus did with the Americas or how Europe came to dominate the world, since these issues are among the most vital in all the broad sweep ofthe past.

Perhaps an upper-class conspiracy is to blame. Perhaps we are all dupes, manipulated by elite white male capitalists who orchestrate how history is written as part of their scheme to perpetuate their own power and privilege at the expense of the rest of us. Certainly high school history textbooks are so similar that they look like they might all have been produced by the same executive committee of the bourgeoisie. In 1984 George Orwell was dear about who determines the way history is written: “Who controls the present controls the past.”

The symbolic representation of a society's past is particularly important in stratified societies. The United States is stratified, of course, by social class, by race, and by gender. Some sociologists think that social inequality motivates people, prompting harder work and more innovative performance. Inequality is also intrinsically unfair, however, because those with more money, status, and influence use their advantage to get still more, for themselves and their children. In a society marked by inequality, people who have endured less-than-equal opportunities may become restive. Members of favored groups may become ashamed ofthe unfairness, unable to defend it to the oppressed or even to themselves. To maintain a stratified system, it is terribly important to control how people think about that system. Marx advanced this analysis under the rubric false consciousness. How people think about the past is an important part of their consciousness. If members of the elite come to think that their privilege was historically justified and earned, it will be hard to persuade them to yield opportunity to others. If members of deprived groups come to think that their deprivation is their own fault, then there will be no need to use force or violence to keep them in their places.

“Textbooks offer an obvious means of realizing hegemony in education,” according to William L. Griffen and John Marciano, who analyzed textbook treatment of the Vietnam War,

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 tents, 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.

Here, in polite academic language, Griffen and Marciano tell us that controlling elements of our society keep crucial facts from us to keep us ignorant and stupid. Most scholars of education share this perspective, often referred to as “critical theory.”14 Jonathan Kozol is of this school when he writes, “School is in business to produce reliable people.”1 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.”16 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.18 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.

These writers on education take their cue from an even weightier school of thought in social science, the power elite theorists. This school has shown that an upper class does exist in America, whose members can be found at elegant private clubs, gatherings of the Trilateral Commission, and board meetings of the directors of the multinational corporations. Rich capitalists control all three major TV networks, most newspapers, and all the textbook-publishing companies, and thus possess immense power to frame the way we talk and think about current events,

Nevertheless, I wonder whether it is appropriate to lay this particular bundle on the doorstep of the upper class. To blame the power elite for what is taught in a rural Vermont school or an inner-city classroom somehow seems too easy. If the elite is so dominant, why hasn't it also censored the books and articles that expose its influence in education? Paradoxically, critical theory cannot explain its own popularity. Any upper class worth its saltso dominant and so monolithic that it determines how American history is taught in almost every American classroom-must also have the power to marginalize those social scientists who expose it. But the upper class has hardly kept critical theory out of education. On the contrary, critical theorists dominate scholarship in the field. Their books get prominently published and well reviewed; education professors assign them to thousands of students every year.

The upper class controls publishing, to be sure, but its control does not extend to content, at least not if the books in question make money. PrenticeHall, which published Who Rules America Now? by William Dornhoff, is owned by Simon and Schuster, which in turn is owned by Paramount, which used to be part of the conglomerate Gulf and Western but is about to become part of something else. Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol was published by Crown, part of Random House, which is in turn part of the Newhouse corporate empire. One of the glories of capitalism is that somewhere there are publishers who will publish almost any book, so long as they stand to make a profit from it. Ifthe upper class forces the omission of “crucial facts and viewpoints,” then why has it failed to censor the entire marvelous secondary literature in American history-which WHV IS HISTORY TAUGHT LIKE THIS? -

occasionally even breaks into prime-time public television in series like Eyes an she Prize, an account of the civil rights movement. The upper class seems to be falling down on the job.

The elite has also failed to censor American history museums. After textbooks, museums are probably our society's most important purveyors of American history to the public. Unlike textbooks, however, many history museums have undergone considerable changes in the last two decades. The Naiional Museum of American History, part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., offers an illustration. Its newer exhibitssuch as Field to factory, about the northward migration of African Americans, A More Perfect Union, portraying Japanese American concentration camps during World War II, and American Encounters, about the clash and mix of Indian, Latino, and Anglo cultures in New Mexicocriticize aspects of our recent national past. In the same period, the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia, mounted its first-ever exhibit on slavery, which included chains, torture devices, and a catalog that did not minimize the inhumanity of the institution.2i If museums reflect the interests of the power structure, are we to infer that the elite mellowed in the 1980s and early 1990s? These were Reagan-Bush years, when the administration criticized the arts and humanities endowments from a conservative and patriotic stance. We must conclude, mixing a metaphor, that the power elite did not have its thumb on every pie.

To be sure, museum boards include members of the upper class. Robert Heilbroner has pointed out that no matter what is done in America, members of the upper class usually have a hand in it; however, their participation does not mean that they directed the action, nor that it was in their class's interest.25 In the early 1960s, for instance, when elite colleges and universities recruited almost solely in private and suburban public high schools and relied on standardized tests to screen applicants, their student bodies were overwhelmingly white. The power elite theorists could claim that the elite reserved these positions of privilege for their own offspring as part of the structure of unequal opportunity. In the late 1960s, when the same universities competed to recruit and admit African American students, the power elite theorists could claim that the elite was coopting the cream of ghetto society in order to stifle protest and maintain the structure of unequal opportunity. Thus critical or power elite theories seem to explain everything but may explain nothing.