Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus: What Your History Books Got Wrong (43 page)

we become part of the problem. Because history is more personal than geology or even American literature, more about “us,” there is an additional reason not to present it honestly; don't we want our children to be optimists? Some people feei that we should sanitize history to protect students from unpleasamries, at least until they are eighteen or so. Children have to grow up soon enough as it is, these people say; let them enjoy childhood. Why confront our young people with issues even adults cannot resolve? Must we tell all the grisly details about what Columbus did on Haiti, for example, to fifth-graders?90 Sissela Bok wrote a whole book about, and mostly against, lying; but she seems to agree that lying to children is OK, and compares it to sheltering them from harsh weather.

Certainly age-graded censorship is the one form of censorship that almost everyone believes is appropriate: fifth-graders should not see violent pornography, for instance. Some fifthor even twelfth-graders who encounter illustrations of Spaniards cutting off Indians' hands or Indians committing suicide might have nightmares about Columbus. Withholding pornography is not a precise analogy to whitewashing history, however. When we fail to present students with the truth about, say, Columbus, we end up presenting a lie insteadat least a lie of serious omission, I doubt that shielding children from horror and violence is really the cause of textbook omissions and distortions. Books do include violence, after all, so long as it isn't by “us.” For instance, American History describes John Brown's actions at Pottawatomie, Kansas, in 1856:

When Brown learned of the [Lawrence] attack, he led a party of seven men. . . . In the dead of night they entered the cabins of three unsuspecting families. For no apparent reason they murdered five people. They split open their skulls with heavy, razor-sharp swords. They even cut off the hand of one of their victims.

Telling of skulls split open and providing minutiae like the heft and sharpness of the swords prompt us to feel revulsion toward Brown. Certainly the author does not provide these details to shield students from unpleasantries.

If textbooks are going to include severed hands, those of the Arawaks cut off by Columbus are much more historically significant. Columbus's severings were systematic and helped depopulate Haiti. American History, having omitted these atrocities, cannot claim to present Pottawatomie evenhandedly.

Violence aside, what about shielding children from other untoward realities of our society? How should social studies classes teach young people about the police, for instance? Should the approach be Officer Friendly? Or should children receive a Marxist interpretation of how the power structure uses the police as its first line of control in urban ghettoes? Does the approach we choose depend on whether we teach in the suburbs or the inner city? If a more complex analysis of the police is more useful than Officer Friendly for inner-city children, does that mean we should teach about slavery differently in the suburbs from the inner city?

In 1992 Los Angeles exploded in a violent race riot, triggered by a white suburban jury's acquittal of four police officers who had been videotaped beating a black traffic offender, Rodney King. Almost every child in America saw this most famous of all home videotapes. Therefore almost every child in America learned that Officer Friendly is not the whole story. We do not protect children from controversy by offering only an Officer Friendly analysis in school. All we do is make school irrelevant to the major issues of the day. Rock songs bought by thirteen-year-olds treat AIDS, nuclear war, and ecocide. Rap songs discuss racism, sexism, drug use-and American history. We can be sure chat our children already know about and think about these and other issues, whether we like it or not. Indeed, attempts by parents to preserve some nonexistent childhood innocence through avoidance are likely to heighten rather than reduce anxiety.U2 Lying and omission are not the right ways. There is 3 way to teach truth to a child at any age level.

Maybe textbooks that emphasize how wonderful, fair, and progressive our society has been give some students a basis for idealism. It may be empowering for children to believe that simply by living we all contribute to a constantly improving society. Maybe later, when students grow up and learn better, they will be motivated to change the system to make it resemble the ideal. Maybe stressing fairness as a basic American value provides a fulcrum from which students can criticize society when they discover, perhaps in college history courses, how it has often been unfair. This all may be an instance of Emily Dickinson's couplet “The Truth must dazzle gradually/ Or every man be blind.”

Since fewer than one American in six ever takes an American history course after leaving high school, it is not clear just when the next generation will get dazzled by the troth in American history. Another problem with this line of thinking is that the truth may then dazzle students with the sudden realization that their teachers have been lying to them. A student of mine wrote of having been “taught the story of George Washington receiving a hatchet for his birthday and proceeding to chop down his father's favorite cherry tree.” To her horror this student later discovered that “a story I had held sacred in my memory for so long had been a lie.” She ended up “feeling bitter and betrayed by my earlier teachers who had to lie to build up George Washington's image, causing me to question all that I had previously learned.” This student's alienation pales besides that of African Americans when they confront another truth about the Founding Fathers: “When I first learned that Washington and Jef ferson had slaves, I was devastated,” the historian Mark Lloyd told me. “I didn't want to have anything more to do with them.'”14 Selling Washington as a hero to Native Americans will eventually founder on a similar rock when they learn what he did to the Iroquois.

It is hard to believe that adults keep children ignorant in order to preserve their idealism. More likely, adults keep children ignorant so they won't be idealistic. Many adults fear children and worry that respect for authority is all that keeps them from running amok. So they teach them to respect authorities whom adults themselves do not respect. In the late 1970s survey researchers gave parents a series of statements and asked whether they believed them and wanted their children to believe them. One statement stood out: “People in authority know best.” Parents replied in these proportions:

13%“believe and want children to believe” 56%“have doubts but still want to teach to children” 30%“don't believe and don't want to pass on to children”

Thus a majority of parents wanted their children not to doubt authority figures, even though the parents themselves doubted.

Some adults simply do not trust children to think. For several decades sociologists have documented Americans' distrust of the next generation. Parents may feel undermined when children get tools of information and inquiry not available to adults and use them in ways that seem to threaten adult-held values. Many parents want children to concentrate on the 3 R's, not on multicultural history. Shirley Engle has described “a strident minority [of teachers and parents] who do not really believe in democracy and do not really believe that kids should be taught to think.”7 Perhaps adults' biggest reason for lying is that they fear our historyfear that it isn't so wonderful, and that if children were to learn what has really gone on, they would lose all respect for our society. Thus when Edward Ruzzo tried in 1964 to cover up Warren G. Harding's embarrassing love letters to a married woman, he used the rationale “that anything damaging to the image of an American President should be suppressed to protect the younger generation.” As fudge Ruzzo put it, there are too many juvenile delinquents as it is.

Ironically, only people who themselves have been raised on shallow feelgood history could harbor such doubts. Harding may not have been much ofa role model, but other AmericansTom Paine, Thoreau, Lincoln, Helen Hunt Jackson, Martin Luther King, and yes, John Brown, Helen Keller, and Woodrow Wilson too-are still celebrated by lovers of freedom everywhere. Yet publishers, authors, teachers, and parents seem afraid 10 expose children to the blazing idealism of these leaders at their best. Today many aspects of American life, from the premises of our legal system to elements of our popular culture, inspire other societies. If Russia can abandon boosterish history, as it seems to have done, surely America can toaTO “We do not need a bodyguard of lies,” points out Paul Gagnon. “We can afford to present ourselves in the totality of our acts.”lc Textbook authors seem not to share Gagnon's confidence, however. There is a certain contradiction in the logic of those who write patriotic textbooks. On the one hand, they describe a country without repression, without real conflict. On the other hand, they obviously believe that we need Co lie to students to instill in them love of country. But if the country is so wonderful, why must we lie?

Ironically, our lying only diminishes us. Bernice Reagon of the Smithsonian Institution has pointed out that other countries are impressed when we send spokespeople abroad who, like herself, are willing to criticize the United States. Surely this is part of what democracy is about. Surely in a democracy a historian's dury is to tell the truth. Surely in a democracy students need to develop informed reasons to criticize as well as take pride in their country. Maybe somewhere along the line we gave up on democracy?

Lying to children is a slippery slope. Once we have started sliding down it, how and when do we stop? Who decides when to lie? Which lies to tell? To what age group? As soon as we loosen the anchor of fact, of historical evidence, our history textboat is free to blow here and there, pointing first in one direction, then in another. If we obscure or omit facts because they make Columbus look bad, why not omit those that make the United States look bad? or the Mormon Church? or the state of Mississippi? This is the politicization of history. How do we decide what to teach in an American history course once authors have decided not to value the truth? If our history courses aren't based on fact anyway, why not tell one story to whites, another to blacks? Isn't Scott, Foresman already doing something like that when it puts out a “Lone Star” edition of Land of Promise, tailoring the facts of history to suit (white) Texans?

These are rhetorical questions, I suppose. Because they commonly repeat treatments from earlier textbooks for the most part, authors rarely answer them consciously. In any event, postmodernists caution us not to “privilege” one account over others with the label “true.” Philosopher Martin Heidegger once defined truth as “that which makes a people certain, clear, and strong,” and American history textbooks apparently intend to do just that, at least for conventional European Americans. Before we abandon the old “correspondence to fact” sense of truth in favor of Heidegger's more useful definition, however, we may want to recall that he gave it in the service of Adolf Hitler. Moreover, if the textbooks aren't true, they leave us with no grounds for defending the courses based on them, when students charge that American history is a waste of time. Why should children believe what they learn in American history, if their textbooks are full of distortions and lies? Why should they bother to learn it?

Luckily, as the next chapter tells, they don't.

William Jennings Bryan: “I do not think about the things that I do not think about.” Clarence Darrow: 'Do you ever think about the things that you do think about?' Inherit the Wind Learning social studies is, to no small extent, whether in elementary school or the university, learning to be stupid.

Yeah, I cut class, I got a D 'Cause history meant nothin' to me.

The truth shall make us free. The truth shall make us free. The truth shall make us free some day. Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe, The truth shall make us free some day.

Jules Henry Jungle Brothers Verse of "We Snail Overcome'

Lies My Teacher Told Me

12. What Is the Result of Teaching History Like This?

All over America, high school students sit in social studies and American history classes, look at their textbooks, write answers to the questions at the end of each chapter, and take quizzes and examinations that test factual recall. When I was subjected to this regimen, I never answered any of the terms at the end of the chapter until the sixth week of each six-week grading period. Then the teacher and I would negotiate what proportion of the terms I had to define correctly to get an A“ {usually something like 85 percent) and I would madly write out definitions through the last two days ofclass. Three years later, when my sister took American history, student culture had developed a more effective technique. Students did the work on time, writing real definitions to the first two and last two terms, but for the thirty or forty in the middle they free-associated whatever nonsense they wanted. ”Hawley-Smoot Tariff I have no idea, Mr. De Moulin,“ might be one entry. Or ”Blue Eagle: FDR's pet bird who got very sad when he died,“ Educational theorists call such acts ”day-today resistance"a phrase that comes from theorizing about slaverybut I did not know that then. I was just envious that my class hadn't thought of such a marvelous labor-saving ploy.

Of course, fooling the teacher is of little consequence. Quite possibly my sister's teacher even knew of the ruse and joked about it with his colleagues, the way masters chuckled that their slaves were so stupid they had to be told every evening to bring in the hoes or they would leave them out in the night dew. Some social studies and history teachers try to win student cooperation by telling them, when introducing a topic, not to worry, they won't have to learn much about it. Students happily acquiesce.4 Students also invest a great deal of creative energy in getting teachers to waste time and relax requirements.5 Teachers acquiesce partly because, as with much day-to-day resistance during slavery, yielding does not really threaten the system. Day-to-day school resistance also provides students a form of psychic distance, a sense that although the system may have commanded their pens, it has not won real cooperation from their minds.

Indeed, it hasn't. Study after study shows that students successfully resist learning American history.6 A few years ago I observed a class of students being tested on George F. Baer, the Hepburn Act, the Newlands Reclamation Act, the Northern Securities Case, and the Elkins Actand this merely got them part of the way through Teddy Roosevelt's first term! All they could hope to do was cram these items into short-term memory for the test, then forget them to make room for the next list. In the process, they failed to gain any insights or to distinguish airy facts as important enough to merit recall after the end of the grading period.

When two-thirds of American seventeen-year-olds cannot place the Civil War in the right half-century, or 22 percent of my students reply that the Vietnam War was fought between North and South Korea, we must salute young people for more than mere ignorance.7 This is resistance raised to a high level. Students are simply not learning even the details of American history that textbooks and teachers stress. Still less are they learning to apply lessons from the past to current issues. Students are left with no resources to understand, accept, or rebut historical referents used in arguments by candidates for office, sociology professors, or newspaper journalists. If knowledge is power, ignorance cannot be bliss.

Emotion is the glue that causes history to stick. We old-timers remember where we were when we heard of the death of John F. Kennedy because it affected us emotionally. American history is a heartrending subject. When students read real voices from our past, the emotions do not fail to move them. Recall Las Casas's passionate denunciations of the Spanish treatment of Indians: “What we committed in the Indies stands out among the most unpardonable offenses ever committed against God and mankind,” Consider the famous final words of William Jennings Bryan to the 1896 Democratic national convention: “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” Or Helen Keller's attack on the Brooklyn Eagle: “Socially blind and deaf, it defends an intolerable system,” Or Franklin D. Roosevelt's words in the depression, assuring us we had “nothing to fear but fear itself.” Events and images also call forth strong feelings. The saga of Elizabeth Blackwell in medical school, the liberation of Nazi death camp inmates by American (and Russian and British) soldiers, the ultimate success of Jonas Salk in finding a vaccine that would kill poliothese are stirring stories. As textbook critic Mrs, W, K. Haralson writes, “There is no way the glowing, throbbing events of history can be presented fairly, accurately, and factually without involving emotion.”

Earlier ch and courses are many teacherss might be worth seeps into these contrary, most fitional landscape studying it is g< teacher told me, boring.

Another \ students' lives,

teacher in Iowa class of third-gr these students n from U.S. histor the school year, from seeking to connects school "Children, meaningless dat: forget most of t students forget i African America or Asian Araeri because the wa' color and childi white males ine' of mine, who wi crablc Indian pc when he broug brought forth tl that day and no seems reasonab! school year, in 3 Unlike the Abet offense and do self-image to sw Earlier chapters have shown, however, that American history textbooks and courses are neither dispassionate nor passionate. All textbook authors and many teachers seem not to have thought deeply about just what in our past might be worthy of passion, or even serious contemplation. No real emotion seeps into these books, not even real pride.9 Instead, heroic exceptions to the contrary, most American history courses and textbooks operate in a gray emotional landscape of pious duty in which the United States has a good history, so studying it is good for students. “They don't think of history as drama,” one teacher told me. “They all tell me they hate history, because it's dead facts, and boring.”

Another way to cause history to stick is to present it so that it touches students' lives. To show students how racism affects African Americans, a teacher in Iowa discriminated by eye color among members of her all-white class of third-graders for two days. The film A Class Divided shows how vividly these students remembered the lesson fifteen years later.10 In contrast, material from US. history textbooks is rarely retained for fifteen weeks after the end of the school year. By stressing the distant past, textbooks discourage students from seeking to learn history from their families or community, which again dis connects school from the other parts ofstudents' lives.

“Children, [ike most adults, do not readily retain isolated, incoherent, and meaningless data.”“ Since textbooks provide almost no causal skeleton, students forget most of the mass of detail they ”learn“ in their history courses. Not all students forget it equally, however. Caste minority children-Native Americans, African Americans, and Hispanicsdo worse in all subjects, compared to white or Asian American children, but the gap is largest in social studies. That is because the way American history is taught particularly alienates students of color and children from impoverished families. Feel-good history for affluent white males inevitably amounts to feel-bad history for everyone else. A student of mine, who was practice-teaching in Swanton, Vermont, a town with a considerable Indian population, noticed an Abenaki fifth-grader obviously timing out when he brought up the subject of Thanksgiving. Talking with the child brought forth the following reaction: ”My father told me the real truth about that day and not to listen to any white man scum like you!" Yet Thanksgiving seems reasonably benign compared to, say, Columbus Day Throughout the school year, in a thousand little ways, American history offends many students. Unlike the Abenaki youngster, most have-not students do not consciously take offense and do not rebel but are nonetheless subtly put off. It hurts children's self-image to swallow what their history books teach about the exceptional fairness of America. Black students consider American history, as usually taught, “white” and assimilative, so they resist learning it. This explains why research shows a bigger performance differential between poor and rich students, or black and white students, in history than in other school subjects.12 Girls also dislike social studies and history even more than boys, probably because women and women's concerns and perceptions still go underrepresented in history classes.

Afrocentric history arose partly in response to this problem. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., denounces Afrocentrism as “psychotherapy” for blacksa onesided misguided attempt to make African Americans feel good about themselves.14 Unfortunately, the Eurocentric history in our textbooks amounts to psychotherapy for whites. Since historians like Schlesinger have not addressed Eurocentrism, they do not come into the discussion with clean hands. To be sure, the answer to Eurocentric textbooks is not one-sided Afrocentric history, the kind that has Africans inventing everything good and whites inventing slavery and oppression. Surely we do not really want a generation of African Americans raised on antiwhite Afrocentric history, but just as surely, we cannot afford another generation of white Americans raised on complacent celebratory Eurocentric history. Even if they don't learn much history from their textbooks, students are affected by the book's slant. Martha Toppin found unanimous agreement with this proposition among ninety high school students: “If Africa had had a history worth learning about, we would have had it last year in Western Civilization.” The message that Eurocentric history sends to nonEuropean Americans is; your ancestors have not done much of importance. It is easy for European Americans and non-European Americans to take a step further and conclude that non-European Americans are not important today.

From the beginning, when textbooks call Columbus's 1492 voyage “a miracle” and proclaim, “Soon the grateful captain wades ashore and gives thanks to God,” they make the Christian deity God and put Him [sit] on the white side. Omitting the Arawaks' perspective on Haiti continues the process of “otherizing” nonwhites in this first diorama from our history. If the “we” in a textbook included American Indians, African Americans, Latinos, women, and all social classes, the book would read differently, just as whites talk differently (and more humanely) in the presence of people of color. Surely it is possible to write accurate multicultural history that spreads the discomfort around, rather than distorting history to help only affluent white children feel comfortable about their past. Maybe we can even write and teach an American history that children of the nonelite would want to study.

Equally as worrisome is the impact of American history courses on white affluent children. This grave result can best be shown by what I call the “Vietnam exercise.” Throughout the Vietnam War, pollsters were constantly asking the American people whether they wanted to bring our troops home. At first, only a small fraction of Americans favored withdrawal. Toward the end of the war, a large majority wanted us to pull out.

Not only did Gallup, Roper, the National Opinion Research Center, and other organizations ask Americans about the war, they also usually inquired about background variablessex, education, region, and the likeso they could find out which kinds of people were most hawkish (prowar), which most dovish. Over ten years I have asked more than a thousand undergraduates and several hundred nonstudents their beliefs about what kind of adults, by educational level, supported the war in Vietnam. I ask audiences to fill out Table 1, trying to replicate the results ofthe January 1971 national Gallup survey on the war. By January 1971, as I tell audiences, the national mood was overwhelmingly dove: 73 percent favored withdrawal. (I excluded “don't knows.”}

Table 1

In January 1971 the Gallup Poll asked: “A proposal nas been made in Congress to require the U. S. government to bring home all U. S. troops before the end of this year. Would you like to nave your congressman vote for or against this proposal?”

Estimate the results, by education, By filling out this table: Adults with:

College Education High School Education 100%

Grade School Total Education Adults 100% 100%

73%

27%

% for withdrawal of U.S. troops (Doves)

% against withdrawal Of U.S. troops (Hawks)

Totals 100%

Most recent high school graduates are not able even to construct a simple table or interpret a graph. Accordingly, I teach audiences how the table must balancehow, it grade-school-educated adults, for instance, were more dovish than others, hence supported withdrawal by more than 73 percent, some other group must be less dovish than 73 percent for the entire population to balance out at 73 percent doves. If you wish to be an active reader, you might fill out the table yourself before reading further.

By an overwhelming margin-almost 10 to Iaudiences believe that college-educated persons were more dovish. Table 2 shows a typical response.

Table 2

Adults with:

College High School Education Education Grade School EOu cation 100%

Total Adults 100%

90%

75%

60%

73%

10%

25%

40%