Every few years it seems that the nation is embroiled in conflicts over history. Most recently, the conflict arose and ground zero was the Texas Board of Education. There, the Board voted in a series of revisions to its requirements for the course “United States History Studies Since 1877.” I contend that these conflicts could be mostly avoided if students were encouraged to read classical sources rather than text books that define the "story" branded "history."
The nature of the revisions is alteration of the concepts students are expected to master. In other words, the Texas Board of Education, as do many boards of education, votes of principles and concepts they expect students to master over the course of their schooling. Then the text book industry creates text books to cover this list of principles and concepts.
According to an article I read in the Financial Times the other day, because Texas is a populous state and thus a large purchaser of text books, the buying power they have means that their standards tend to affect what text book makers make available throughout the country. The article said that "Historically, this has, in effect, allowed it to dictate the syllabus in smaller states."
One fight concerns what students should learn about the Founding Fathers' belief in the separation of church and state, and another relates how to definate or connote terms like "capitalist" or "free enterprise system." In other words, are these favorable terms or negative terms?
A right-leaning organization published its concerns that the left was speaking out because they want to teach history infused with a left-leaning interpretation.
A left-leaning organization published its concerns that that the proposed changes from the right would lead to a distortion of history by creating a focus on right-leaning thinkers and a decreased focus on left-leaning thinkers.
Part of the underlying problem is the extent to which members of the general public are made to presume that a text book can adequately give an unbiased overview of history. Sadly, this is not really possible. Try the excercise of writing a few paragraphs on a controversial topic (e.g. "the Reagan revolution"; "the abortion debate"; or whether slavery was the primary cause of the civil war). Try hard, in only a couple or three paragraphs, to adequately capture differing views on the subject matter, realizing that your target audience may have no knowledge of the subject matter. Then show your paragraphs to 20 individuals who have strong and diverse opinions about the subject matter about which you are writing. I contend that you are sure to be accused of at least inadvertaint bias, and you might even be convinced that you simply aren't familiar with the whole story.
This problem can be addressed by seeking to escape the text book controversy, and invite students to learn history through the examination of original sources. Readers of Thomas Jefferson's original writers can determine for themselves what they thought of his religious views. Readers of the Adam Smith and Karl Marx can better understand the concepts underlying capitalism and communism than can readers of a text book trying to narrow Smith and Marx into sound bites.
A study of original thinkers makes students think for themselves. Although the text book reader is invited to think that they are receiving "the" story, readers of original source materials are naturally aware that they are reading the views of a particular thinker, who may or may not reflect the views of others.
The is an important valid criticism of "great books" programs. Although "great books" programs educate its readers as to diverse ideas and diverse concepts, it is arguably impossible to get through the history of the United States through one year of study if one is bogged down in comprehensively understanding the complexities of a particular social movement.
There are two answers to this criticism. First, perhaps history curriculums unnecessarily expect its readers to spend time remembering facts that are not so important.
Second, and more importantly, there exists summaries of history that are not artificially authoritative "text books." For instance, when studying the ancient world, one can read Herototus and Thcydides without getting the misimpression that the text has no author's perspective. In the modern world, the same can be true of reading DeToquiville's account of America's founding, Howard Zinn's "People's History of the United States, Paul Johnson's History of the American People, and Max Lerner's America as a civilization." All of these books are individual's accounts of American history. They contain many of the same facts that may be found in the text books, but are not riddled with the same false impression that they represent the "official" story line.
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