Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus: What Your History Books Got Wrong (37 page)

Textbook authors are not solely responsible for the slighting of the recent past in high school history courses. Even if textbooks gave the sasha the space it deserves, most students would have to read about it on their own, because most teachers never ger to the end of the textbook. In her year-long American history course, the fifth-grade teacher Chris Zajac, subject of Tracy Kidder's Among, Schoolchildren, never gets past Reconstruction! Time is not the only problem. Like publishers, teachers do not want to risk offending parents. Moreover, according to Linda McNeil, most teachers particularly don't want to teach about Vietnam. “Their memories of the Vietnam war era made them wish to avoid topics on which the students were likely to disagree with their views or that would make the students 'cynical' about American institutions.” Therefore the average teacher grants the Vietnam War 0 to 4.5 minutes in the entire school year!

DOWN THE MEMORY HOLE

The Vietnam War isn't nearly as contentious as some other issues from the recent past; today more than two of three adult Americans consider the war to have been morally wrong as well as tactically inept.50 More controversial is the women's movement. Every school district includes parents who strongly affirm traditional sex roles and other parents who do not. Homosexuality is even more taboo as a subject of discussion or learning. Raising the topic of affirmative action leads to angry debates. A negative evaluation of the Carter or Reagan administrations would surely offend some Democratic or Republican patents, respectively, Mel and Norma Gabler, who organize right-wingers to pressure textbook publishers, seek to make labor unions and the National Council of Churches too controversial for authors and publishers even to mention. Since all parents have opinions about events they lived through, teachers and authors may feel they must approach most topics in the sasha with extreme caution. The result is a history of the recent past along the line suggested by Thumper's mom: “Ifyou can't say somethin' nice, don't say nothin' at all.” Unsurprisingly, only 2 to 4 percent of college students say that they had any substantial treatment of the Vietnam War in high school.

When textbooks downplay the sasha, however, they make it hard for students to draw connections between the study of the past, their lives today, and the issues they will face in the future. Politicians across the political spectrum invoked “the lessons of Vietnam” as they debated intervening in Angola, Lebanon, Kuwait, Somalia, and Bosnia. Bumper stickers reading “El Salvador is Spanish for Vietnam” helped block sending U.S. troops to that nation.32 “The lessons of Vietnam” have also been used to inform or mislead discussions about secrecy, the press, how the federal government operates, and even whether the military should admit gays. Issues raised by the women's movement in the 1970s continue to reverberate through American society, affecting institutions from individual families to the mass media. And so on. High school graduates have a right to enough knowledge about the recent past to participate intelligently in such debates.

“The past is never dead,” wrote William Faulkner. “It's not even past.” The sasha is our most important past, because it is not dead but living-dead. Its theft by textbooks and teachers is the most wicked crime schools perpetrate on high school students, depriving them of perspective about the issues that most affect them. The semi-remembered factoids students carry with them about the Battle of Put-in-Bay or Silent Cal Coolidge do little to help them understand the world into which they move at graduation. That world is still working out sex roles. That world is full of Third World nations with the potential to become “new Vietnams.” That world is marked by social inequality. Leaving out the recent past ensures that students will take away little from their history courses that they can apply to that world.

Florida's Disney World presents an exhibit called “American Adventure,” a twenty-nine-minute history of the United States. The exhibit completely leaves out the Vietnam War, the ghetto riots of the 1960s and 1990s, and anything else troubling about the recent past," The compressed and bland accounts of the recent past in American history textbooks show a similar failure of nerve on the part of authors, publishers, and many teachers. High school students deserve better than Disney World history, especially since their textbooks are by no means as much fun as the amusement park.

DOWN THE MEMORY HOLE

God has not been preparing the English speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing. . . . He has given us the spirit of progress to overwhelm the forces of reaction throughout the earth. He has made us adept in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples. . . . And of all our race He has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the redemption of the world.

Sen. Albert J. Beveriage, 19001 Americans see history as a straight line and themselves standing at the cutting edge of it as representatives for all mankind.

Frances FrtzGera/d2 The study of economic growth is too serious to be left to the economists.

£. J. Mishan It is becoming increasingly apparent that we shall not have the benefits of this world for much longer. The imminent and expected destruction of the life cycle of world ecology can only be prevented by a radical shift in outlook from our present naive conception of this world as a testing ground to a more mature view of trie universe as a comprehensive matrix of life forms. Making this shift m viewpoint is essentially religious, not economic or political.

Vine Deloria, Jr.

Lies My Teacher Told Me

10. Progress Is Our Most Important Product

Steadfast reader, we are about to do something no high school American history class has ever accomplished in the annals of American education: reach the end of the textbook. What final words do American history courses impart to their students? TheAmerican Tradition assures students “that the American tradition remains strongstrong enough to meet the many challenges that lie ahead.“ ”If these values are those on which most Americans can agree,“ says The American Adventure, ”the American adventure will surely continue.“ ”Most Americans remained optimistic about the nation's future. They were convinced that their free institutions, their great natural wealth, and the genius of the American people would enable the US. to continue to beas it always has beenTHE LAND OF PROMISE,” Land of Promise concludes.

Even textbooks that don't end with their titles close with the same vapid cheer. “The American spirit surged with vitality as the nation headed toward the close of the twentieth century,” the authors of The American Pageant assure us, ignoring opinion polls that suggest the opposite. Life and Liberty climbs further out on this hollow limb; “America will have a great role to play in these future events. What this nation does depends on the people in it.” “Problems lie ahead, certainly,” predicts American Adventures. “But so do opportunities.” The American people “need only the will and the commitment to meet the new challenges of the future,” according to Triumph oftheAmericanNation. In short, all we must do to prepare for the morrow is keep our collective chin up.

As usual, such content-free unanimity signals that a social archetype lurks nearby. This one, the archetype of progress, bursts forth in full flower on the textbooks' last pages but has been germinating from their opening chapters.

For centuries, Americans viewed their own history as a demonstration of the idea of progress. As Thomas Jefferson put it:

Let the philosophical observer commence a journey from the savages of the Rocky Mountains eastwards towards our seacoast. These he would observe in the earliest stage of association, living under no law but that of nature . . . He would next find those on our frontiers in the pastoral state, raising domestic animals to supply the defects of hunting, . . . and so in his progress he would meet the gradual shades of improving man until he would reach his, as yet, most improved siate in our seaport towns. This, in fact, is equivalent to a survey, in time, of the progress of man from the infancy of creation to the present day. And where this progress will stop no one can say.s The idea of progress dominated American culture in the nineteenth century and was still being celebrated in Chicago at the Century of Progress Exposition in 1933. As recently as the 1950s, more was still assumed to be better. Every midwestern town displayed civic pride in signs marking the city limits: “Welcome to Decatur, Illinois, Pop. 65,000 and growing.” Growth meant progress and progress provided meaning, it) some basic but unthinking way. In Washington the secretary of commerce routinely celebrated when our nation hit each new According to American History, “Westward the Course ol Empire Takes its Way” has been reproduced in more American histories than any other picture by Currier and Ives. StereotyRically contrasting “primitive” Native hunters and fishers with bustling white settlers, the picture suggests that progress doomed the Indian, so we need not looK closely today at the process of dispossession.

In the 1950s a graphics firm redesigned the symbol for Explorer Scouting to be more “up to date.” The new symbol's onward ant) upward thrust perfectly represents the archetype of progress.

milestone170,000,000, 185,000,000, etc.on his “population clock.”6 We boasted that America's marvelous economic system had given the United States “72 percent of the world's automobiles, 61 percent of the world's telephones, and 92 percent of the world's bathtubs,” and all this with only 6 percent of the world's population.7 The future looked brighter yet: most Americans believed their children would inherit a better planet and enjoy fuller lives.

This is the America in which most textbook authors grew up and the America they still try to sell to students today. Three textbooks offer appendixes that trace recent trends, all onwards and upwards. These efforts are undistinguished. They do not use constant dollars, for one thing, so their bar graphs of rapidly rising family income or health care expenditures show far more “progress” (if spending more on health care is progress) than occurred. The American Pageant records the steep increase (flattening in about 1980) in number of automobiles in the United States, percentage of Americans homes with television sets, and the like. No textbook charts phenomena that might be negative, such as frequency of air pollution alerts, increased reliance on imported oil, or declining real wages.

Perhaps textbooks authors do not question the notion that bigger is better because the idea of progress conforms with the way Americans like to think about education: ameliorative, leading step by step to opportunity for individuals and progress tor the whole society. The ideology of progress also provides hope for the future. Certainly most Americans want to believe that their society has been, on balance, a boon and not a curse to mankind and to the planet8 History textbooks go even further to imply that simply by participating in society, Americans contribute to a nation that is constantly progressing and remains the hope of the world. The closing sentence of The American Pageant states, “As the twentieth century approaches its sunset, the people of the United States can still proudly claim in the words of Lincoln, that they and their heritage represent 'the last best hope of earth.'” Thus the idea of American exceptionalism-the United States as the most moral country in the worldwhich starts in our textbooks with the Pilgrims, gets projected into the future.

Faith in progress has played various functions in society and in American history textbooks. The faith has promoted the status quo in the most literal sense, for it proclaims that to progress we must simply do more of the same. This belief has been particularly useful to the upper class, because Americans could be persuaded to ignore the injustice of social class if they thought the economic pie kept getting bigger for all. The idea of progress also fits in with Social Darwinism, which implies that the lower class is lower owing to its own fault. Progress as an ideology has been intrinsically amirevolutionary: because things are getting better all the time, everyone should believe in the system. Portraying America so optimistically also helps textbooks withstand attacks by ultrapatriotic critics in Texas and other textbook adoption states.

Internationally, referring to have-not countries as “developing nations” has helped the “developed nations” avoid facing the injustice of worldwide stratification. In reality “development” has been making Third World nations poorer, compared to the First World. Per capita income in the First World was five times that in the Third World in 1850, ten times in 1960, and fourteen times by 1970,“ The vocabulary of progress remains relentlessly hopeful, however, with regard to the ”undeveloped.“ As E. J. Mishan put it, ”Complacency is suffused over the globe, by referring to these destitute and sometimes desperate countries by the fatuous nomenclature of “developing nations,'”10 In the nineteenth century, progress provided an equally splendid rationale for imperialism. Europeans and Americans saw themselves as performing governmental services for and utilizing the natural resources of natives in distant lands, who were too backward to do it themselves.

Gradually the archetype of progress has been losing its grip. In the last quarter-century, the intellectual community in the United States has largely abandoned the idea. Opinion polls show that the general public too has been losing its faith that the future is automatically getting better. Reporting this new climate of opinion, the editors of a 1982 symposium entitled “Progress and Its Discontents” put it this way: “Future historians will probably record that from the mid-twentieth century on, it was difficult for anyone to retain faith in the idea of inevitable and continuing progress.”

Probably not even textbook authors still believe that bigger is necessarily better. No one celebrates higher populations.12 Today, rather than boast of our consumption, we are more likely to lament our waste, as in [his passage by Donella H. Meadows, co-author of The Limits to Growth: “In terms of spoiling the environment and using world resources, we are the world's most irresponsible and dangerous citizens,” Each American born in the 1970s will throw out 10,000 noreturn bottles and almost 20,000 cans while generating 126 tons of garbage and 9.8 tons of paniculate air pollution. And that's just the tip of" the trashberg, because every ton ofwaste at the consumer end has also required five tons at the manufacturing stage and even more at the site of initial resource extraction.

In some ways, bigger still seems to equal better. When we compare ourselves to others around us, having more seems to bring happiness, for earning a lot of money or driving an expensive car implies that one is a more valued member of society. Sociologists routinely find positive correlations between income and happiness. Over time, however, and in an absolute sense, more may not mean happier. Americans believed themselves to be less happy in 1970 than in 1957, yet they used much more energy and raw materials per capita in 1970.

The 1973 Arab oil embargo precipitated the new climate of opinion, for it showed America's vulnerability to economic and even geological factors over which we have little control. The new pessimism was exemplified by the enormous popularity of that year's ecocidal bestseller, The Limits to Growth.14 Writing the next year, Robert Heilbroner noted the new pessimism: “There is a question in the air . . . 'Is there hope for man?'”15 Robert Nisbet, who thinks that the idea of progress “has done more good over a 2500-year period . . . than any other single idea in Western history,”16 nonetheless agrees that the idea is in twilight. This change did not take place all at once. Intellectuals had been challenging the idea of progress for some time, dating back to The Decline ofche West, published during World War I, in which Oswald Spengler suggested that Western civilization was beginning a profound and inevitable downturn." The war itself, the Great Depression, Stalinism, the Holocaust, and World War II shook Western belief in progress at its foundations.

Developments in social theory further undermined the idea of progress by making Social Darwinism intellectually obsolete. Modern anthropologists no longer believe that our society is “ahead of” or “fitter than” so-called “primitive” societies. They realize that our society is more complex than its predecessors but do not rank our religions higher than “primitive” religions or consider our kinship system superior. Even our technology, though assuredly more advanced, may not be better in that it may not meet human needs over the long term.

Another key justification for our belief in progress had come from biological theory. Biologists used to see natural evolution as the survival of the fittest.

By 1973 a much more complex view of trie development of organisms had swept the field, “Life is not a tale of progress,” according to Stephen Jay Gould. “It is, rather, a story of intricate branching and wandering, with momentary survivors adapting to changing local environments, not approaching cosmic or engineering perfection.”

Since textbooks do not discuss ideas, it is no surprise that they fail to address the changes in American thinking resulting from World War I, World War II, the Holocaust, or Stalinism, let alone from developments in anthropological or biological theory. By 1973, however, another problem with progress was becoming apparent: the downside risks of our increasing dominance over nature. Environmental problems have grown more ominous every year.

Most books at least mention the energy crises caused by the oil embargo of 1973 and the Iran-Iraq War in 1979. No worries, however: textbook authors imply that both crises found immediate solutions. “As a result” of the 1973 embargo, Triumph ofibe American Nation tells us, “Nixon announced a program to make the United States independent of all foreign countries for its energy requirements by the early 198s.” Ten pages later, in response to gas rationing in 1979, “Carter set forth another energy plan, calling for a massive program to develop synthetic fuels. The long-range goal of the plan was to cut importation of oil in half.” No mention in 1979 of Nixon's 1973 plan, which had failed so abjectly that our dependence on foreign oil had spiraled upward, not downward.20 No mention that Congress never even passed most of Carter's 1979 plan, inadequate as it was. Virtually all the textbooks adopt this trouble-free approach. “By the end of the Carter administration, the energy crisis had eased off,” Land of Promise reassures its readers. “Americans were building and buying smaller cars.” “People gradually began to use less gasoline and conserve energy,” echoes TheAmerican Tradition.

If only it were that simple! Between 1950 and 1975 world fuel consumption doubled, oil and gas consumption tripled, and the use of electricity grew almost sevenfold.21 If our sources of energy are not infinite, which seems likely since we live on a finite planet, then at some point we will run up against shortages. A century ago farming in America was energy self-sufficient: livestock provided the fertilizer and tillage power, farm families did the work of planting and weeding, wood heated the house, wind pumped the water, and photosynthesis grew the crops. Today American farming relies on enormous amounts ofoil, not only for tractors and trucks and air conditioning, but also for fertilizers and herbicides. Given these circumstances, most social and natural scientists concluded from the 1973 energy crisis that we cannot blithely maintain our economic growth forever. “Anyone having the slightest familiarity with the physics of heat, energy, and matter,” wrote Mishan in 1977, “will realize that, in terms of historical time, the end of economic growth, as we currently experience it, cannot be that far off.”J2 This is largely because of the awesome power of cornpound interest. Economic growth at three percent, a conventional standard, means that the economy doubles every quarter-century, typically doubling society's use of raw materials, expenditures of energy, and generation of waste.