Don’t Know Much About History…..

80 million Americans went back to school this week.  My husband and I were among those eager learners.  As was our 26 year old daughter.  We all sat in desks, listened to teachers, tried out new ideas and skills.  In the US, September is back to school month.

My husband and I are taking advantage of our local Adult School’s offerings; Wednesday nights he goes to Woodcarving and I go to Intermediate French.  He came home with a little piece of wood and new tools.  I came home with a CD of French songs and some exercises on silent sounds at the ends of words.  ( Eg: tabac, oeufs.)

Our daughter is a new graduate student at the University of California at Davis: in 15 months she will receive a Master’s Degree in Education and her Teaching Credential to be a high school social studies teacher – history, government, economics, etc.  They’ve already placed her as a teaching assistant in a US History class at Vanden High School in Travis, CA.

So I thought we might spend some time this fall here at the Back Road Café’s American branch thinking about education, and in particular American history.  How it is taught?  What do US History textbooks say and omit about our history?  What new methods and subjects are being taught to prospective history teachers?

My daughter was assigned to read this summer Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, by James Loewen.  Loewen analyzes and critiques 12 commonly used high school US history textbooks.

You get the idea from his Table of Contents:

1) Handicapped by History; The Process of Hero-making.  The truth about Helen
     Keller - Socialist, Woodrow Wilson - Racist, etc.

2) 1493: The True Importance of Christopher Columbus, the Indians, etc.

3) The Truth about the First Thanksgiving, European diseases, etc.

4) The Truth about Native slaves, the French and Indian Wars, the Louisiana
     Purchase and much more.

5) The Invisibility of Racism in American Textbooks.

6) John Brown and Abraham Lincoln: The Invisibility of Anti-Racism in American History Textbooks.

7) The Land of Opportunity: The Absence of Social Class in Textbooks.

8) What Textbooks teach and omit about the federal government.

9) See No Evil: Choosing Not to Look at the War in Vietnam.

10) Conclusion: What’s the Result of Teaching History Like this?  Minority
       Students End Up Alienated, All Students End Up Bored and No One Can
       Use the Past to Think Cogently About the Future.

Why do we teach 16 year olds US history?  What’s the goal?  To form obedient citizens?  Critical thinkers?  Researchers?  Social activists?  Voters?  (A pathetically small percentage of US citizens even bother voting.  By studying US history do we become more interested in participating in government or more apathetic or cynical?)  The US Council for Social Studies says their goal is “to promote civic competence.”

I skimmed Lies My Teacher Taught Me while my daughter was home and was struck with two points, probably because they remind me of biases I seem to have picked up; hero making and too much attention to the executive branch.

(We may return to this topic, the teaching of US history and the teaching of teachers, as the school year progresses.)

Hero Making:  That’s his first chapter.  We could call it the “People Magazine approach to history.”  Focus on the people, use stories of people to address the issues.  Not a bad teaching method.  But, like People mag, portraits can be simplistic, airbrushed, too emotional.  As an example, Loewen fills out the picture of American icon Helen Keller.  She’s important not just for her triumph over being blind, deaf and mute, but for her active Socialism; she learned that most folks with her same disabilities were victims of industrial accidents or poor health care, and she wrote and publicly protested on behalf of Socialism.  I never knew the great Helen Keller was a Socialist.  What other myths have I been sold?

US = Presidents:  Because we love stories about people, we focus too much on the stories of Presidents, not enough on the other two government branches, legislative and judicial.  My daughter says she’s already been encouraged to have students act out key court rulings, like Marbury vs. Madison, 1803.  I had to ask her to remind me what that case was about.  And it’s not all about President Madison.  Without Marbury we would not have had the recent Supreme Court ruling in support of gay marriage.  I invite you to look it up – good teacher that I am I am not going to do the work for you!

We’ll return to the classroom from time to time this fall.  And I’ll also let you know how Woodcarving and French are going.  A bientot!

Copyright © 2013 Deborah Streeter