When the Senate voted 99-1 two years ago to condemn the national history standards drawn up at the behest of the federal government, people concerned about the brainwashing of school children with politically correct history figured the battle had been won. Wrong. Sure, the standards-writers pieced together a revised version that seemed to mollify most critics, highlighting a previously snubbed George Washington and other neglected heroes and stories. But that all now seems a ruse. When children turn to page one of their new history textbooks, they will read a history entirely in keeping with the seemingly rejected first set of standards.
Those interested may think that Lynne Cheney, who launched the attack on the standards in October 1994, nailed them when she exposed the bogus “three worlds meet” theory according to which Native Americans, Africans, and Europeans shared equally in the American founding. Cheney raised the nation’s consciousness by laying bare the standards’ misplaced emphasis on the ” grandeur” of Mansa Musa’s court, their suggestion that students hold a mock trial of John D. Rockefeller, their near deification of American Indians, their disproportionate coverage of the Ku Klux Klan and McCarthyism, and their omission of Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Jonas Salk, and the Wright brothers.
But Cheney’s expose, though absolutely correct, turns out to have had little impact on educators and publishers. Also ignored were scholarly critiques of the standards by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Herman Belz, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, and John Patrick Diggins, among others, as well as scathing accounts by media commentators. Even President Clinton and presidential candidate Bob Dole complained about the standards in the 1996 campaign. Nevertheless, certain of support from the American Historical Association and a host of like-minded groups, which overwhelmingly approved of the original standards, educators and publishers simply forged ahead.
A comprehensive review of eight recent high school history texts from the major publishers in the field shows that the influence of the original, condemned history standards is pervasive. In fact, these books read like one long lawyer’s brief in the case of Oppressed People v. White Males. At every juncture of American history, the trinity of race, class, and gender is revealed to be somehow at work.
Thus (using Cheney’s objections to the original standards as a handy reference), it turns out that Mansa Musa, unknown to most Americans, now is a fixture of U.S. history texts. Why We Remember, published by Addison Wesley, reports that Europeans were so impressed with “Mali’s greatest emperor” and his slaves toting gold to Mecca that they “pictured him in an atlas”; not worth noting, apparently, is the sophistication of a culture whose geographers produced illustrated atlases in the 14th century. Globe Fearon’s One Nation, Many People (the most race-based text of the lot) praises Mansa and credits Askia Muhammad Toure of the Songhai Empire for his ” strong and fair government . . . and fair taxation,” but it ignores the fact that their economies were based upon slavery.
When they do discuss slavery in Africa, these books underscore a qualitative and moral difference between West African and North American slavery. Holt Rinehart Winston’s The American Nation explains that “many slaves in West African society were either criminals or captives taken in war. . . . Most could marry, and their children did not become slaves. Moreover, slavery was only temporary [and] individuals could obtain their freedom.” For students reading these texts, West African slavery wasn’t really so bad, and slavery didn’t become “devastating” and “especially painful” until Europeans began to “traffic in human slaves.”
Recycling another item Lynne Cheney had singled out for ridicule, Glencoe’s History of a Free Nation asks students whether the United States would have been “better off with or without” John D. Rockefeller. The KKK and McCarthyism rate 15 mentions in the index of Glencoe’s American Odyssey against zero for the Federalist Papers.
Houghton Mifflin’s History of the United States reduces Edison’s contributions to four words: “Edison invented electric light.” McDougal Littell’s America: Past and Promise contains a picture of Edison, as does The American Nation, but both provide larger pictures with captions of black inventors Granville T. Woods, a supposed Edison rival, and Lewis Latimer, Edison’s obscure assistant.
The new texts feature feminist Fanny Wright, black jurist Jonathan J. Wright, author Richard Wright, and architect Frank Lloyd Wright, but the Wright brothers have all but disappeared. Of the books reviewed here, only The American Nation mentions America’s famous inventor brothers, with this single caption:
“US Army buys first airplane from the Wright brothers.” Albert Einstein isn’t remembered for developing the revolutionary theory of relativity; when he is mentioned (and most texts ignore him), he is cast as a minor figure in a sidebar, as a scientist who wrote a letter to Franklin Roosevelt urging the development of the atomic bomb. Prentice Hall’s America: Pathways to the Present offers only a picture of Einstein, with the caption: “Albert Einstein informs President Roosevelt that atomic weapons are possible.” Was Einstein, then, the evil madman behind nuclear weapons?
American Odyssey (whose author, Gary Nash, co-directed the standards- writing project) introduces the obscure 19th-century sociologist Lester Frank Ward, who argued that “the shaping of a society’s destiny was the job of government.” Students are asked to “defend Ward’s view that government should ‘liberate the forces of society,'” versus the possibility that such an idea ” might lead to a tyrannical government.” Given the 45 lines of text on the importance of Ward, it’s clear which side is meant to prevail and what idea is to be planted in the heads of kids.
The new texts present American dealings with Indian populations not as war between incompatible cultures, but as something explained by racism. America: Pathways to the Present is typical. It perpetuates the myth of the noble Indian with the story of Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa, who leave “a vital legacy of defiance of invasion and respect for themselves, their people, and their culture. In later years, they would be a model for Native Americans reclaiming their traditions.” In this text, students learn about the massacres at Sand Creek and Wounded Knee, which point to the racism of the oppressors, but never hear of the cruel and vicious treatment of settlers at the hands of Indians in the Wyoming Massacre, the scalping of women and children at Ft. Mims, or hundreds of other brutal and horrific encounters.
The history of relations between Indians and settlers is ultimately not a happy one for Indians, who lost the battles and wars. But these texts do not give students the opportunity to understand that racism alone cannot explain why the Indian wars were fought or why the Indians lost. Unless students get a more rounded history, they will not see that people can be animated by various human impulses: They can be moved by the desire for freedom or the lust for revenge; by hate or greed; by a sense of duty or the yearning for glory. To reduce human action to racism is to ignore the full range, complexity, and reality of human life.
Most pernicious of all, perhaps, is these books’ distortion of the American founding. The central concern, here as in the condemned standards, is to account for minorities. In accordance with the “three worlds meet” view, the standards open the story not with the English and other Europeans (where it actually begins), but with “the first peopling of the Americas some 30,000 years ago.” They go on to discuss “the spread of human societies and the rise of diverse cultures in the Americas” in preparation for delving into the ” historical convergence of European, African, and Native American peoples.” The original standards are explicit about the rationale for this theory: It is designed to address present-day concerns over perceived social injustice. Both the standards and the texts focus their discussion of American origins on disputes over land and not on the liberal democratic ideas of the Enlightenment or the English customs, traditions, institutions, religions, history, and language whose predominance in America was decisive.
The shift from ideas to land permits the standardswriters and textbook- writers to view American history as a saga of race wars, through which an amorphous European juggernaut pursued the project of destroying innocent Indians, Africans, and Asians. If children are informed that America has been from the beginning a “multicultural” entity where some participants sought to protect their land and others sought to steal it, not only can the bothersome history of discovery, conquest, and settlement and the English heritage of political ideas be swept away and forgotten, but every facet of history is transformed into tragedy for the losers. And of course, to repair the awful damage of the past, immediate government action is required.
The purpose of this instruction is no mere dissemination of historical information. It is massive indoctrination, the politicization of history under the guise of boosting minorities’ self-esteem. Textbook authors willingly toot the horns of the so-called excluded but balk at crediting Europeans with any distinction. Students are told that black Africa had a ” great center of learning” in Timbuktu but know nothing of the more than 60 universities in Europe by the time of Columbus. How can they understand our history without some comparative perspective on the accomplishments of European and other civilizations?
The American Nation perfectly reflects the new template for history textbooks: The old “limited” history of America was about “politicians, military leaders, and other notables, most of them white males whose ancestors had come from the British Isles or northern Europe. Today’s history is far richer in social texture, [a history that includes] men and women, Native Americans, and immigrants from Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and all other parts of the world.” All eight of these books start from the same assumption as the history standards: Columbus is the bad guy, and Native Americans and Africans — but not the English or other Europeans — are the heirs to rich cultures.
Even in schools where teachers say they do not use textbooks, the influence of the original history standards is plain. A fifth-grade curriculum from State College, Pa., for example, doesn’t bother having students read the actual Declaration of Independence, but does have them revise it. After discussing “why the Declaration of Independence only lists rights for white, adult males,” children are encouraged to “choose one group that was omitted and write how they might include statements that would include the rights of women, children, African Americans, and Native Americans.” When studying the Constitution, students are asked to provide an answer for the inclusion problem posed by the phrase “We the people . . .”
The trouble with this manufactured history is not only that it is false, but also that it is unlikely to produce citizens who understand the tenets of liberal democratic government. Instead, children’s heads are being filled with a sentimental, politically correct version of their heritage. Given the shelf-life of history texts, American children for at least the next decade may be unable to think of the founding fathers without a cynical laugh. For that matter, our youngsters will be unlikely to think of most other white male figures as anything but racist, sexist elitists.
Against this dismal backdrop, there is, happily, one excellent new history series from a major publisher, Oxford University Press’s A History of US. And, of course, careful teachers can mitigate the ill effects of the other new texts with supplements and debates crafted to expose errors and make up for omissions. But diligent parents should always review their children’s lessons and homework for curricular abuse. As the new textbooks come into use, one fact is clear: The national history standards once thought to be discredited have made their way into the nation’s classrooms, and we are all the losers.
David Warren Saxe is associate professor of education at Pennsylvania State University.
