Lies My Teacher Told Me (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

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.