Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus: What Your History Books Got Wrong (45 page)

Moreover, thinking well of education reinforces the ideology we might call American individualism. It leaves intact the archetypal image of a society marked by or at least striving toward equality of opportunity. Yet precisely to the extent that students believe that equality of opportunity exists, they are encouraged to blame the uneducated for being poor, just as my audiences blame them for being hawks on the war in Vietnam. Americans who are not poor find American individualism a satisfying ideology, for it explains their success in life by laying it at their own doorstep. This enables them to feel proud of their success, even if it is modest, rather than somehow ashamed of it. Crediting success to their position in social structure threatens those good feelings. It is much more gratifying to believe that their educational attainments and occupational successes result from ambition and hard workthat their privilege has been earned. To a considerable degree, working-class and lower-class Americans also adopt this prevailing ethic about society and schooling. Often working-class adults in dead-end jobs blame themselves, focusing on their own earlier failure to excel in school, and feel they are inferior in some basic way Students also have short-term reasons for accepting what teachers and textbooks tell them about the social world in their history and social studies classes, of course.. They are going to be tested on it. It is in the students' interest just to learn the material. Arguing takes more energy, doesn't help one's grade, and even violates classroom norms. Moreover, there is a feeling of accomplishment derived from learning something, even something as useless and mindless as the answers to the identification questions that occupy the last two pages of each chapter in most history textbooks. Students can feel frustrated by the ambiguity of real history, the debates among historians, or the challenge of applying ideas from the past to their own lives. They may resist changes in the curriculum, especially if these involve more work or work less clearly structured than simply “doing the terms.” After years of rote education, students become habituated to it and inexperienced and ineffectual at any other kind of learning.

In the long run, however, “learning” history this way is not really satisfying. History textbooks and most high school history teachers give students no reason to love or appreciate the subject. We must not ignore the abysmal ratings that history courses receive,24 and we cannot merely exhort students to like history more. But this does not mean the sorry state of learning in most history classrooms cannot be changed. Students will start learning history when they see the point of doing so, when it seems interesting and important to them, and when they believe history might relate to their lives and futures. Students will start rinding history interesting when their teachers and textbooks stop lying to them.

Once you have learned how to ask questionsrelevant and appropriate and substantial questionsyou have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know.

Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner Do not try to satisfy your vanity by teaching a great many things. Awaken people's curiosity. It is enough to open minds; do not overload them.

Anatole France2 He is a lover of his country who rebukes and does not excuse its sins.

Frederick Douglass The future of mankind lies waiting for those who will come to understand their lives and take up their responsibilities to all living things.

VineDeloria, Jr.

Lies My Teacher Told Me

Afterword: The Future Lies Ahead and What to Do about Them

If the authors of American history textbooks took notice of the points made in the first ten chapters of this book, then textbooks would be far less likely to present, and teachers to teach, distorted and indefensibly incomplete accounts of our past. Lies My Teacher To/dMeis itself incomplete, however. It says little abour Hispanic history, for example, fet our textbooks are so Anglocentric that they might be considered Protestant history.5 What about women's history and the history of gender in America, two different but related topics? Lies mentions both subjects from time to time but makes no thorough critique of how textbooks present women's history and gender issues. And what about the next lie? The next historical marker, commemorative statue, museum exhibit, feature film set in the American past, television miniseries, or historical novel will probably pass on more misinformation. At the least, it will present its topic incompletely and partially. What is to be done about these future lies?

The answer is not to expand Lies My Tedcber Told Me to cover every distortion and error in history as traditionally taught, to say nothing of the future lies yet to be developed. That approach would make me the arbitrator-I who still unknowingly accept all manner of hoary legends as historical fact. Despite my sincere effort, this book undoubtedly contains important errors and should not simply be presumed true.7 Surely the answer is for all of us to become, in Postman and Weingartner's vulgar term, crap detectors3independent learners who can sift through arguments and evidence and make reasoned judgments. Then we will have learned how to learn, as Postman and Weingartner put it, and neither a one-sided textbook not a one-sided critique of textbooks will be able to confuse us.

To succeed, schools must help us learn how to ask questions about our society and its history and how to figure out answers for ourselves. At this crucial task most American history textbooks and courses fail miserably.

Part of the problem is with form. Because they try to cover so many things, textbooks, at least as currently incarnated, cannot effectively acquaint students with issues and controversies and thereby with historical argument, with its attendant skills of using logic and marshaling evidence to persuade. Mentioning is part of the problem. Even when textbooks discredit the myths that clog our historical arteries, students don't retain the tiny rebuttals in their history textbooks.9 They forget the untoward fact that contradicts the myth, for it doesn't fit with the powerful archetype. History textbooks and teachers must make special efforts and take enough time to teach effectively against these archetypes. Mircea Eliade has referred to “the inability of collective memory to retain historical events except insofar as it transforms them into archetypes.”10 Truth, to be retained, must be given the same mythic significance that we have given our lies,

Throughout the United States, roadside markers distort history. The former Confederate states are full of Civil War monuments and roadside markers, for example, that look back nostalgically at “the Lost Cause” and misrepresent Southerners as united in its defense. When Grant's gunboats moved up the Tennessee River into northeast Mississippi in February 1862, white residents of Tishomingo County lined the banks and cheered. In 1863 support from black residents in southwest Mississippi enabled Grant to abandon his supply lines and attack Vicksburg from the south and east. Despite this roadside marker's words, “the people” Grant's forces encountered were mostly African American who responded to “the blueclad invaders” by supplying them with food, showing them the best roads to Jackson, and telling them exactly where the Confederates were.

A marvelous teaching device would be for a class to examine roadside markers in their community, deciding which is least accurate. Then it could propose a corrective marker to stand next to the biased commemoration anO perhaps help raise money for its erection. In the process, students would learn much about the forces that push history, especially public history like markers and textbooks, to be inaccurate.

For this reason, I find myself tongue-tied when teachers ask what textbook I recommend. Perhaps no traditional textbook can be written that will empower rather than bore us with history.

What, then, is to be done?

The portrait of lying painted in the last two chapters as a vertically integrated industry, including textbook boards, publishers, authors, teachers, students, and the public, may appear bleak. It follows, however, that intervention can occur at any point in the cycle. The next few paragraphs are directed particularly toward teachers, who can intervene even in the absence of transformed textbooks. Those of us not in the classroom can play a role in changing how history is taught by supporting teachers who put innovative approaches into practice.

The first critical change must be in the form: we must introduce fewer topics and examine them more thoroughly. There is no way to get students to explore and bring primary and secondary sources to bear on the thousands of topics that now clutter history textbooks. Rather than having students memorize the names Amerigo Vespucci, Giovanni Verrazano, Ponce de Leon, Hernando De Soto, etc., and a phrase telling what each allegedly did, teachers can help students focus on the larger picturethe effects of Columbia's 1493 expe dition upon Haiti and Spain, and then on all the Americas, Europe, the Islamic world, and Africa. So many details connect with major issues such as this that I suspect students will come away remembering more particulars than if they had merely regurgitated factoids. Certainly students will recall the projects they worked on and the issues they worked through themselves. Many educators have already put into effect teaching methods that deviate from the deadening “learn the textbook” routine and provide models for other teachers.

Covering fewer topics will enable classes to delve into historical controversies. Doing so is an absolute requirement if students are to learn that history is not fust answers. The answers one gets depend partly upon the questions one asks, and the questions one asks depend partly upon one's purpose and one's place in social structure. Perhaps not everyone in the classroom will come to the same conclusion. Teachers need to put themselves in the position that for students to disagree with their interpretation is OK, so long as students back up their disagreement with serious historical work: argumentation based on evidence. Students who research both sides will discover which issues and questions facts will resolve, and which differences involve basic values and assumptions. The students' positions must then be respected. This does not imply that teachers should concede the floor or accede to the now fashionable opinion that all points of view are equally appropriate and none is to be “privileged” with the label “true.”

Teachers do not have to know everything to facilitate independent student learning. They can act as informed reference librarians, directing children to books, maps, and people who can answer their questions about history. Resources already exist that can help teachers teach history creatively, using primacy materials.'

Perhaps the best resources are right at hand. Students can interview their own family members, diverse people in the community, leaders of local institutions, and older citizens. Some history classes have compiled oral histories of how the depression affected their town or how desegregation affected their school. Students in a Mississippi high school published a book, Minds Sixyed on Freedom, about the civil rights movement in their community.14 Students in a Massachusetts school “became” historical figures and published their work. For students to create knowledge is exciting and empowering, even ifthe product merely gets placed in the school library. Students might also suggest a new historical marker for their school or community. Often the most important events go unrecorded on the landscape, while markers commemorate the nineteenthcentury site of the First Presbyterian Church. What events at a high school were important enough to be noted on a marker? Which graduates “should” be commemorated? Which made history, and is a broader definition of “making history” needed? Do the names of local streets or buildings honor people whose acts we are now trying to rectify? Mississippi's Ross Barnett Reservoir, for example, pays tribute to the racist governor who tried to keep African Americans out of the University of Mississippi, while Medgar Evers, the state's heroic NAACP leader murdered because of his efforts on behalf of civil rights, goes remembered mainly by a college named for him in Brooklyn! Who should be honored? Why? How? Raising these questions leads students to important issues; if their answers are controversial, so much the better.

Teaching history backwards from the present also grips students' attention. The teacher presents current statistics on high school seniors' life chances, analyzed by race, sex, social class, and regiontheir prospects for various levels of educational achievement, divorce, incarceration, death by violence; their life expectancy, frequency of voting, etc. Then students are challenged to discuss events and processes in the past that cause these differences.

Even if teachers do not challenge textbook doctrine, students and the rest of us are potential sources of change. If that statement seems idealistic, consider that African American students have actively pressured several urban school systerns for new curricula. White high school students throng to see revisionist movies about American history, whether by Kevin Costner (Dances with Wolves] or Spike Lee. Not history itself but traditional American history courses turn students off. Whether we read textbooks, see historical movies, or visit museum exhibits, we must learn how to deal with sources. This process entails putting five questions to each work.

First, why was it written (or painted, etc.)? Locate the audience in social structure. Consider what the speaker was trying to accomplish. This is part of what sociologists call the “sociology of knowledge” approach, English professors call it “contextualization” learning about the social context of the text.

A second question, also part of the sociology of knowledge approach, is to ask whose viewpoint is presented. Where is the speaker, writer, etc., located in social structure? What interests, material or ideological, does the statement serve? Whose viewpoints are omitted? Students might then attempt to rewrite the story from different viewpoints, thus learning that history is inevitably partial.

Third, is the account believable? Does each acting group behave reasonablyas we might, given the same situation and socialization? This approach also requires examining the work for internal contradictions. Does it cohere? Do some of its assertions contradict others? if textbooks emphasize the United States as a generally helpful presence in Latin America, for example, how do they explain anti-Yankee sentiment in the region?

Fourth, is the account backed up by other sources? Or do other authors contradict it? This question sends us to the secondary historical and social science literature. Even a cursory encounter with cross-cultural research on social class, for instance, is enough to refute the glowing textbook accounts of America as a land of unparalleled opportunity.

Finally, after reading the words or seeing the image, how is one supposed to feel about the America that has been presented? This analysis also includes examining the authors' choice of words and images. “Most of the words we use in history and everyday speech are like mental depth charges,” James Axtell has written. “As they descend [through our consciousness] and detonate, their resonant power is unleashed, showering our understanding with fragments of accumulated meaning and association.”

Readers who keep these five questions in mind will have learned how to learn history.

Teachers and students are not the only fulcrtims for change. New factors make transformed textbooks possible. In California, Texas, and other states, rightwing conservatives still influence textbook adoptions, but so now do many others.

Beginning in 1985, for instance, Texas forced some publishers to treat evolution more honestly, avoid such stereotypical terms as go on the warpath, when referring to Native Americans, and add white before southerners where appropriate. The ensuing standoffs between black nationalists, feminists, right-wingers, First Amendment groups, etc., allow authors and publishers new room to maneuver.

Consumers of educationstudents, teachers, parents, and interested citizensare beginning to demand textbooks with real flavor, history that can even upset the stomach. According to Michael Wallace, Americans are ready for it. People generally “are angry at having been conned and are curious to know more,” he claims, “Witness the triumph of Roots in a culture once seemingly mired in the pieties of Gone with the Wind.”“ It is about time. For history is central to our ongoing understanding of ourselves and our society. We need to produce Americans of all social-class and racial backgrounds and of both genders who command the power of historythe ability to use one's understanding of the past to inspire and legitimize one's actions in the present. Then the past will seriously inform Americans as individuals and as a nation, instead of serving as a source of weary cliches. Products of successful American history courses know basic social facts about the United States and understand the historical processes that have shaped these facts. They can locate themselves in the social structure, and they know some of the societal and ideological forces that have influenced their lives. Such Americans ate ready to become citizens, because they understand how to effect change in our society. They know how to check out historical assertions and are suspicious of archetypal ”truths." They can rebut the charge that history is irrelevant, because they realize ways that the past influences the present, including their own present.