Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus: What Your History Books Got Wrong (41 page)

What about the authors? Since every bad paragraph had to have an author, surely authors lie at the heart of the process. It's not always clear who the real authors are, however. According to Hillel Black, the names on the cover of a textbook are rarely those of the people who really wrote it.44 Lewis Todd and Merle Curti may have written the first draft of Rise ofthe American Nation back in 1949, but by the time its tenth edition came out in 1991, now titled Triumph ofthe American Nation, Curti was ninety-five and Todd was dead. The people listed as authors on some other textbooks have even less to do with them. Some teachers and historians merely rent their names to publishers, supplying occasional advice in return for a fraction of the usual royalties, while minions in the bowels of the publishing houses do the work of organizing and writing the textbooks.

An executive at Prentice-Hall told me that James Davidson and Mark Lytle “have written every word” of The United StaresA History of the Republic, except “the skills” sections and “maybe not the photo captions.” She also told me that Daniel Boorstin “controls every word that goes into his book,” which is not quite the same thing but does imply substantial author involvement. Prentice-Hall relies on Davidson and Lytle to keep A History ofthe Republic current in historical content, according to the publisher, but Mark Lytle claimed more modestly that he and his coauthor play only “a kind of authentication role” regarding new editions. The publisher initiates the new material and it is “too late to make any major changes once it reaches us.” The bulk of the publisher's changes have been aimed toward keeping the book up to date in pedagogical style and changing the last chapter to bring the book closer to the present. Publishers tend to innovate more than authors, so although new editions may have new looks and even new bibliographies, they rarely have much new historical content. Gradually, as books move from first to fifth or eighth editions, the listed authors have less and less to do with them.

In interviews with me, publishing executives blamed adoption boards, school administrators, or parents, whom they feel they have to please, for the distortions and lies of omission that mar U.S. history textbooks. Parents, whether black militants or Texas conservatives, blame publishers. Teachers blame administrators who make them use distasteful books or the publishers who produced them. But authors blame no one. They claim credit for their books. Several authors told me that they suffered no editorial interference. Indeed, authors of three different textbooks told me that their editors never offered a single content suggestion. “That book doesn't have fifty words in it that were changed by the editor!” exclaimed one author. “They were so respectful of my judgment, they were obsequious,” said another. “I kept waiting for them to say no, but they never did.”

If authors claim to have written the textbooks as they wanted, then maybe they are to blame for their books. Sometimes they don't know any better. I asked John Garraty, author of American History, why he omitted the plague in New England that devastated Zndian societies before the Pilgrims came. “I didn't know about it,” was his straightforward reply,

Sometimes authors do know better. As previously mentioned, in After [be Fact, a book aimed at college history majors, James Davidson and Mark Lytle do 3 splendid job telling of the Indian plagues, demonstrating that they understand their geopolitical significance, their devastating impact on Indian culture and religion, and their effect on estimates of the precontact Indian population. In After the Fact, looking down from the Olympian heights of academe, Davidson and Lytle even write, “Textbooks have finally begun to take note of these largescale epidemics.” Meanwhile, their own high school history textbook leaves them out!

How are we to understand this kind of behavior? Authors know that even if their textbook is good, it won't really count toward tenure and promotion at most universities, where the message is “Sealscholars don't write textbooks.”50 If the textbook is bad, the authors won't get chastised by the profession because professional historians do not read or review high school textbooks. Thus the authors' academic reputations are not really on the line.

Adoption boards loom in the textbook authors' minds to a degree, especially when publishers bring them up. Authors rarely have personal knowledge of the adoption processI am an unfortunate exception! Editors may invoke students' parents as well as adoption boards in cautioning authors not to give offense. “I wanted a text that could be used in every state,” one author told me. She relied on her publisher for guidance about what would and would not accomplish this aim. Mark L ytle characterized his own textbook as “a McDonald's version of historyif it has any flavor, people won't buy it.” He based this conclusion on his publisher's “survey of what the market wanted.”i On the other hand, publishers know that “students, parents, teachers want to see themselves represented in the texts,” as one editor said to me, and occasionally influence authors to make their books less traditional. Michael Kammen tells of a publisher who tried to persuade the two authors of an American history textbook to give more space to Native Americans. Thomas Bailey's publisher pressed him to include mote women and African Americans in The American Pageant?

Regardless of the direction of the input, publishers are in charge. “They didn't want famous people, because we'd be more tractable,” Mark Lytle told me, explaining why a major publisher had sought out him and James Davidson, relative unknowns. Two widely-published authors told me that publishers tore up textbook contracts with them because they didn't like the political slant of their manuscripts. “We have arguments,” one editor told me bluntly. “We usually win.”

Very different conditions apply to secondary works in history, where the intended readership typically includes professional historians. Authors of booklength secondary works know that publishers and journal editors hire professional historians to evaluate manuscripts, so they write for other historians from the beginning. Writers also know that other historians will review their monographs after publication, and their reputation will be made or broken by those reviews in the historical journals.

With such different readerships, it is natural for secondary works and textbooks to be very different from each other. Textbook authors need not concern themselves unduly with what actually happened in history, since publishers use patriotism, rather than scholarship, to sell their books. This emphasis should hardly be surprising: the requirement to take American history originated as part of a nationalist flag-waving campaign early in this century." Publishers start the pitch on their outside covers, where nationalist titles such as The Challenge of Freedom and Land of Promise are paired with traditional patriotic icons: eagles, Independence Hall, the Stars and Stripes, and the Statue of Liberty. Publishers market the books as tools for helping students to “discover” our “common beliefs” and “appreciate our heritage.” No publisher tries to sell a textbook with the claim that it is more accurate than its competitors.

Textbook authors also bear their student readers in mind, to a degree. From my own experience I know that imagining what one's readers need is an important part of the process of writing a history textbook. Some textbook authors are high school teachers, but most are college professors who know only a few high school or junior high school students personally. Interviews with textbook authors revealed that their imagining of what students need is a sttange process. Something about the enterprise of writing a high school American history textbook converts historians into patriots. One author told me that she was the single parent of an eleven-year-old girl when she started work on her textbook. She “wanted to wrice a book that Samantha would be proud of.” I empathized with this desire and told of my own single parenting of a daughter about the same age. Further conversation made clear, however, chat this author did not simply mean a book her daughter would respect and enjoy. Rather, she wanted a book that would make her daughter feel good about America, a very different thing,

Other textbook authors have shared similar comments with me. They want to produce good citizens, by which they mean people who take pride in their country. Somehow authors feel they must strap on the burden of transmitting and defending Western civilization. Sometimes there was almost a touch of desperation in their commentssort of an “apres moi, le deluge.” Authors can feel that they get only one shot at these children; if they do not reach them now, America's future might be jeopardized. In turn, this leads to a feeling of selfimportancethat one is on the front line of our society, helping the United States continue to grow strong. Not only textbook authors feel this way: historians and history teachers commonly cite their role in building good citizens to justify what they da In “A Proud Word for History,” Allan Nevins waxes euphoric over “school texts that told of Plymouth Rock, Valley Forge, and the Alamo,” He lauds history's role in making a nation strong. “Developing in the young such traits as character, morals, ethics, and good citizenship,” according lo Richard Gross, former president of the National Council for the Social Studies, “are the reasons for studying history and the social sciences.”58 When we were writing our Mississippi history my coauthors and I felt the same way that we mighc improve our state and its citizens by imparting knowledge and changing attitudes in its next generation.

When the authors of American history textbooks have their chance to address che next generation at large, however, even those who in their monographs and private conversations are critical of some aspects of our society, they seem to want only to maintain America rather than change it. One textbook author, Carol Berkin, began her interview with me by saying, “As a historian, I am a feminist socialist.”9 My jaw dropped, because her textbook displays no hint of feminism or socialism. Surely a feminist author would write a textbook that would help readers understand why no woman has ever been president or even vice-president of the United States. Surely a socialist author would write a textbook that would enable readers to understand why children of working class families do not become president or vice-president, the mythical Abraham Lincoln to the contrary.

If textbooks are overstuffed, overlong, often wrong, mindless, baring, and all alike, why do teachers use them? In one sense, teachers are responsible for the miseducation in OUT history classrooms. After all, the distortions and omissions exposed in the first ten chapters of this book ate lies our teachers tell us. If enough teachers complained about American history textbooks, wouldn't publishers change them? Teachers also play a substantial role in adopting the textbooks; in most states, textbook rating committees are made up mainly of teachers, from whom publishers have faced no groundswell of opposition. On the contrary, many teachers like the textbooks as they are. According to researchers K, K. Wong and T. Loveless, most teachers believe that history textbooks are good and getting better.

Could it be that they just don't know the truth? Many history teachers don't know much history, a national survey of 257 teachers in 1990 revealed that 13 percent had never taken a college history course, and only 40 percent held a B.A, or M.A. in history or had a major with “some history” in it,62 Furthermore, a study of Indiana teachers revealed that fewer than one in five stay cur rent by reading books or articles in American history, A group of high school history teachers at a recent conference on Christopher Columbus and the Age of Exploitation gasped aloud to learn that people before Columbus knew the world to be round. These teachers were mortified to realize that for years they had been disseminating false information. Of course, teachers cannot teach that which they do not know.

Most teachers do not like controversy. A study some years ago found that 92 percent of teachers did not initiate discussion of controversial issues, 89 percent didn't discuss controversial issues when students brought them up, and 79 percent didn't believe they should. Among the topics that teachers felt children were interested in discussing but that most teachers believed should not be discussed in the classroom were the Vietnam War, politics, race relations, nuclear war, religion, and family problems such as divorce.

Many teachers are frightened of controversy because they have not experienced it themselves in an academic setting and do not know how to handle it. “Most social studies teachers in U.S. schools are ill prepared by their own schooling to deal with uncertainty,” according to Shirley Engle. “They are in over their heads the minute that pat answers no longer suffice.” Inertia is also built into the systemi many teachers teach as they were taught. Even many college history professors who well know that history is full of controversy and dispute become old-fashioned transmitters of knowledge in their own classrooms.

Since textbooks employ a rhetoric of certainty, it is hard for teachers to introduce either controversy or uncertainty into ihe classroom without deviating from the usual standards of discourse. Teachers rarely say “I don't know” in class and rarely discuss how one might then find the answer. “I don't know” violates a norm. The teacher, like the textbook, is supposed to know Students, for their part, are supposed to learn what teachers and textbook authors already know.

It is hard for teachers to teach open-endedly. They are afraid not to be in control of the answer, afraid of losing their authority over the class. To avoid exposing gaps in their knowledge, teachers allow their students to make “very little use of the school's extensive resources,” according to researcher Linda McNeil, who completed three studies of high school social studies classes between 1975 and 1981.66 Who knows where inquiry might lead or how to manage it? John Goodlad found that less than one percent of instructional time involved class discussions requiring “reasoning or perhaps an opinion from students.”67 Instead of discussion and research, teachers emphasize “simplistic teacher-controlled information.” Teachers' “patterns of knowledge control were, according to their own statements in taped interviews, rooted in their desire for classroom control,” according to McNeil.68 They end up adopting the same omniscient tone as their textbooks. As a result, teachers present a boring, overly ordered way ofthinking, much less interesting than the way people really think. Summarizing McNeil's research, Albert Shanker, himself an advocate for teachers, notes that the same teachers who are “vital, broad-minded, and immensely knowledgeable in private conversations” nonetheless come across as “narrow, dull, and rigid in the classroom.”