What kind of U.S. History textbook would be skimpy in its discussion of George Washington? The most popular ones, according to Democracy's Half-Told Story: What American History Textbooks Should Add, a new study from the Education for Democracy Project.
That omission is not atypical, either. Author Paul Gagnon, who is a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, also points out that none of the five 11th-grade history books he studied provides an adequate assessment of Abraham Lincoln. (Though one finds room in its discussion of the Civil War for two pages on regulating water rights in the West, and another fills 20 of its 43 pages on the war with maps, illustrations and special features.") And none of them deals in any but a superficial way with the important role religion has played in our history.
We've already heard criticism like these about textbooks. The books that are supposed to get kids excited about history and science usually are nothing to get excited about. They are "beautiful but dumb," with terrific illustrations -- and plenty of them -- set in mind-numbing prose. Stuffed with facts and terms and boxed figures, they touch on everything and make sense out of very little. Professor Gagnon does find the books he examines many cuts above the miserable minimum of many textbooks -- "half' the story gets told, anyway -- but he also points to many deficiencies. And 50 percent still isn't a passing grade.
You know the standard explanations for these problems. Textbooks have to "cover" a great deal of material in a short space, and that makes it difficult to treat a subject coherently. Also, textbook publishers tell us they print what will sell. And, they might add, what will offend no one while satisfying the special demands of special groups. To accomplish this balancing act with history books, publishers make sure certain facts or incidents and certain pictures are included. And they omit things that would make the story exciting, balanced -- and useful to a student trying to understand the lessons history has to tell -- because these things might be controversial.
But how do we move from explaining what's wrong to changing it? With history texts, anyway, realizing that history is a story, one we tell ourselves, would be a big help.
When you tell a story, you can't tell everything; you have to choose what you're going to include and what you're going to leave out. And the choice is based on a certain attitude towards life or a certain point of view. Once upon a time, all history was told from the point of view of kings and queens. People believed that only what happened to their rulers was important. Nobody else counted. Marxism records history in terms of class struggle. The Women's Movement sees it as a story of the subjugation, struggles and occasional triumphs of women. Anybody writing a history has a assert that something is central. It's like what you do if you write a biography. You don't try to talk about what your subject did every day of his life. You pick out certain traits and characteristics that reveal themselves in the person's life and influence its course, the things that show the essence of his character. And it's the same with writing a history.
Otherwise, you just have a lot of facts that don't hang together and don't tell a story. That's why many kids hate history -- they learn it from books that are a bunch of unconnected facts.
What should be central in telling the story of the United States to students in I I th grade history? What should determine the people in the events that are included, the treatment they get and the connections that are made? Gagnon suggests several themes, the principal one being the "slow unsteady journey of liberty and justice, together with the economic, social, religious and other forces that barred or smoothed the way." In other words, how we got democracy, how we kept it and how we struggle to keep it. This is an exciting story -- all the more so because it isn't over yet and students themselves will get to play a part in it. It's a story that will draw students in and help them understand what being a citizen in a democracy means.
Of course, this is not the only story you could write about America's past. You could write a history from the point of view of race and ethnic relations in the United States. You could write one about America's economic development. Or one that showed the development of our system of education. Furthermore, every generation has to write its own histories because we perceive the past in terms of the preoccupations and problems we are now living with.
You might ask why, given all these possible points of view, we should choose the unfolding of democracy as the story to tell 11th graders about our history? Isn't it ethnocentric, chauvinistic to insist on this particular story? Something like brainwashing? I don't think so. Kids who are going to grow up to be citizens need to understand how our countries institutions developed and how they work today. Just the way kids who are going to be doctors will need to understand the circulatory system and kids who are going to be bridge-builders will need to understand the stresses in metal.
And when we think about how the Chinese students in Tiananmen -Square used the language of democracy to express their aspirations and the Statue of Liberty to symbolize them, I don't think we need to be apologetic about wanting high school students to take an honest and intelligent look at American institutions in a course that tells the story of our democracy.