Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus: What Your History Books Got Wrong (42 page)

David Jenness has pointed out that professional historical organizations for at least a century have repeatedly exhorted teachers not to teach history as fact memorization. “Stir up the minds of the pupils,” cried the American Historical Association in 1893; avoid stressing “dates, names, and specific events,” historians urged in 1934; leaders of the profession have made similar appeals in almost every decade in between and since.7" Nevertheless teachers continue to present factoids for students to memorize. Like textbook authors, teachers can be lazy. Teaching is stressful. Bad textbooks make life easier. They make lesson plans easy to organize. Moreover, publishers furnish lavish packages that include videos for classroom viewing, teachers' manuals with suggestions on how to introduce each topic, and examinations ready to duplicate and gradable by machine. Textbooks also offer teachers the security of knowing they are covering the waterfront, so their students won't be disadvantaged on statewide or nationwide standardized tests.

For all these reasons, national surveys have confirmed that teachers use textbooks more than 70 percent of the time.71 Moreover, most teachers prefer textbooks that are simitar to the books they are already using, a big reason why the “inquiry textbook” movement never caught on in the late 1970s. “Teachers often prefer the errors they are familiar with to unfamiliar but correct information”another reason why errors get preserved and passed on to new generations.

Laziness is not exactly a fair charge, however. When are teachers supposed to find time to do research so they can develop their own course outlines and readings? They already work a fifty-five-hour week. Most teachers are far too busy teaching, grading, policing, handing out announcements, advising, comforting, hall monitoring, cafeteria quieting, and then running their own households to go off and research topics they do not even know to question. After hours, they are often required to supervise extracurricular activities, to say nothing of grading papers and planning lessons.75 During the academic year most school districts allow teachers just two to four days of “in-service training.” Summers offer time to retool but no money, and we can hardly expect teachers to subsidize the rest of us by going three months with no income to learn American history on their own.

Some of the foregoing pressures affect teachers of my subject. But certain additional constraints affect teachers in American history. Like the authors of history textbooks, history teachers can get themselves into a mind-set wherein they feel defensive about the United States, especially in front of minority students. Like authors, teachers can feel that they are supposed to defend and endorse America. Even African American teachers may feel vaguely threatened by criticism of America, threatened lest they be attacked too. Teachers naturally identify with the material they teach. Since the textbooks are defensively boosterish about America, teachers who use them run the risk of becoming defensively boosterish too. Compare the happier estate of the English teacher, who can hardly teach, say, Langston Hughes's mildly subversive poem “Freedom Train” without becoming mildly subversive. Similarly, it is hard to teach Triumph of the American Nation without becoming mildly boring.

Social studies and history teachers often get less respect from colleagues than faculty in other disciplines. When asked what subject might be dropped, elementary school teachers mentioned social studies more often than any other academic area.74 Some high school principals assign history to coaches, who have to teach something, after all. Assigning American history classes to teachers for whom history lies outside their field of competencewhich is the case for 60 percent of U.S. history teachers, according to a nationwide study. obviously implies the subject is not important or that “anyone can teach it.” History teachers also have higher class loads than teachers of any other academic subject.

Students too consider history singularly unimportant. According to recent research on student attitudes toward social studies, “Most students in the United States, at all grade levels, found social studies to be one of the least interesting, most irrelevant subjects in the school curriculum.”

Many teachers in social studies sense what students think of their subject matter. All too many respond by giving up insidenot trying to be creative, making only minimal demands, simply staying ahead of their students in the book. Students in turn respond “with minimal classroom effort,” and the cycle continues.

Relying on textbooks makes it easier for both parties, teachers and students, to put forth minimal effort. Textbooks' innumerable listsof main ideas, key terms, people to remember, dates, skill activities, matching, fill in the blanks, and review identificationswhich appear to be the bane of students' existence, actually have positive functions. These lists make the course content look rigorous and factual, so teachers and students can imagine they are learning something. They make the teacher appear knowledgeable, whereas freer discussion might expose gaps in his/her information or intelligence. Lastly, these lists of items give students a sense offairness about grading: performance on “objective” exams seeking recall of specific factoids is easy to measure. Thus lists reduce uncertainty by conveying to students exactly what they need to know78 Fragmenting history into unconnected “facts” also guarantees, however, that students will not be able to relate many of these terms to their own lives and will retain almost none ofthem after the six-weeks' grading period.

In some ways the two inquiry textbooks in my sample are better than the ten narrative textbooks. Both inquiry books, The American Adventure and Discovering American History, suggest ways students can use primary materials while examining them for distortions. Thf American Adventure directly challenges ethnocentrism in its teachers' guide, a topic never mentioned in any of the other textbooks or their supplementary teaching guides. Research suggests that the inquiry approach leads to higher student interest in contemporary politics.80 However, inquiry textbooks require much more active teaching. Classes can't just plow through them. Teachers must supplement them with additional information, leave out parts ofthe book, choose which exercises to assign, and work in concert with their school librarians. Perhaps it is because inquiry textbooks WHV IS HISTORV TAUGHT LIKE THIS?

do not rely on cote learning that teachers and school administrators soon abandoned them. The inquiry approach was too much work.

If teachers seem locked into the traditional narrative textbooks, why don'i teachers teach against them, at least occasionally? Teaching against the book is hard. We have already noted the logistical problems of time and workload. Resources are also a problem, Where do teachers find a point of leverage? If a state historical museum or university is nearby, that can help. But how do teachers know when they do not know something? How do they know when their book is wrong or misleading? Moreover, students have been trained to believe what they read in print. How can teachers compete with the expertise of established authors backed by powerful publishers?

Teaching against a textbook can also be scary. Textbooks offer security. Teachers can hide behind them when principals, parents, or students challenge them to defend their work. Teaching against the textbook might be construed as critical of the school system, supervisor, principal, or department head who selected it. Teachers could get in trouble for doing that.

A student of mine who was practice-leaching in an elementary school decided to introduce her students to what she had learned from my course about the Pilgrims, the plagues, and Thanksgiving, The professor of education who supervised her field placement vetoed her plan. “Telling the kids this information, going against their traditions, is like telling them there's no Santa Glaus.” He was also concerned that the information might “cause a big controversy with the families.” With the approval of the classroom teacher, my student persevered, however. While she received no parental complaints, it is true that she risked being perceived as hostile or negative by some parents, administrators, and even fellow teachers.

Teachers do get fired, after all. I have interviewed several high school teachers and librarians who have been fired or threatened with dismissal for minor acts of independence such as making material available that some parents consider controversial. Teachers have been fired for teaching Brave New World in Baltimore, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in Idaho, and almost everything else in between. Knowing this, many teachers anticipate that powerful forces will pounce upon them and doubt that anyone will come to their defense, so they relax into what Kenneth Carlson called the “security of selfcensorship.”84 I am convinced, though, that most teachers enjoy substantial freedom in practice. “Most teachers have little control over school policy or curriculum,” wrote Tracy Kidder in Among Schoolchildren, “but most have a great deal of autonomy inside their classrooms.” In Who Controls Our Schools?,

Michael W. Kirst agreed: “Teachers have in effect a pocket veto on what is taught. An old tradition in American public schools is that once the door ofthe classroom shuts nobody checks on what a teacher actually does.”95 Nonetheless even teachers who have little real cause to fear for their jobs typically avoid unnecessary risks.

Perhaps I have been too pessimistic here about teachers. Everywhere I have traveled to speak about the problems with textbooks, I have encountered teachers hungry for accurate historical information. I have met many imaginative teachers who make American history come alivewho bring in controversies and primary source material and challenge students to think. Despite these heroic exceptions in schools all over America, however, the majority of social studies teachers are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Let us cast our net even wider. Are all of us involved? The myths in our history are not limited to our schooling, after all. These cultural lies have been woven into the fabric of our entire society. From the flat-earth advertisements on Columbus Day weekend to the racist distortion of Reconstruction in Gone with the Wind, our society lies to itself about its past. Questioning these lies can seem anti-American. Textbooks may only reflect these lies because we want them to. Textbooks may also avoid controversy because we want them to: at least half of the respondents in national public opinion polls routinely agree that “books that contain dangerous ideas should be banned from public school libraries.”86 And when the National Assessment for Educational Progress sent its social studies assessment instruments to lay reviewers “to help insure that [they] would be acceptable to the general public,” the public replied, “references to specific minority groups should be eliminated whenever possible,” “extreme care” should be used in wording any references to the FBI, the president, labor unions, and some other organizations, and “exercises which show national heroes in an uncomplimentary fashion though factually accurate are offensive.”

]ohn Williamson, the president of a major textbook publishing company, employed this line to defend publishers: “In the 30s, the treatment of females and of black people clearly mirrored the attitudes of society. All females were portrayed in homemaker roles . . . Blacks were not portrayed at all.” Williamson went on to admit that recent improvements in the treatment of women and blacks have not been due to publishers, “much as we would like the credit.” As in the past, “textbooks mirror our society and contain what that society considers acceptable.” Williamson concluded that all this was as it should beparents, teachers, and members of the community should have the right to pressure publishers to present history as they want it presented.

Williamson has a point. However, when publishers hide behind “society,” their argument invokes a chicken-and-egg problematic, for if textbooks varied more, pressure groups in society would have more alternatives for which to lobby. Moreover, Williamson has conceded the major point: that history textbooks stand in a very different relationship to the discipline of history than most textbooks do to their respective fields. “Society” determines what goes into history textbooks. By contrast, the mathematics profession determines what goes into math textbooks and, creationist pressure notwithstanding, the biology profession determines what goes into biology textbooks. To be sure, mathematics and biology textbooks are products of the same complex organizations and delicate adoption procedures as American history textbooks. To be sure, math and biology books also err. But only about history and social studies do writers actually ask, “Can textbooks have scholarly integrity?”811 Only in history is accuracy so political.

Consider the example of black soldiers in the Civil War. Even in the 1930s the facts about their contribution were plain for all to see in the primary sources and even the textbooks of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. Depression-era textbooks omitted those facts, not because they were unknown but because including important acts by African Americans did not “mirror the attitudes of [white) society.” Thus to understand how textbooks in the 1930s presented the Civil War, we do not look at the history of the 1860s but at the society of the 1930s. Similarly, to understand how textbooks today present the Civil War, the Pilgrims, or Columbus, we do not look at the 1860s, 1620s, or 1490s, but at the 1990s. What distortions of history does our society cause? We must not fool ourselves that the process of distorting history has magically stopped. We must not congratulate ourselves that our society now treats everyone fairly and manifests attitudes that allow accurate interpretations of the past. We must not pretend that, unlike all previous generations, we write true history. When parents and teachers do not demand from publishers and schools the same effort to present accurate history that we expect in other disciplines,