NY Times
The New History Wars
By JAMES R. GROSSMAN SEPT. 1, 2014
WASHINGTON — WITH the news dominated by stories of Americans dying at home
and abroad, it might seem trivial to debate how history is taught in our
schools. But if we want students to understand what is happening in Missouri
or the Middle East, they need an unvarnished picture of our past and the
skills to understand and interpret that picture. People don’t kill one
another just for recreation. They have reasons. Those reasons are usually
Last month, the College Board released a revised _“curriculum framework”
_
(http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/ap/ap-course-exam-descriptions/ap-us-history-course-and-exam-description.pdf)
to help high school
teachers prepare students for the _Advanced Placement test in United States
history_
(http://apcentral.collegeboard.com/apc/public/courses/teachers_corner/3501.html)
. Like the college courses the test is supposed to mirror,
the A.P. course calls for a dialogue with the past — learning how to ask
historical questions, interpret documents and reflect both appreciatively and
critically on history.
Navigating the tension between patriotic inspiration and historical
thinking, between respectful veneration and critical engagement, is an
especially
difficult task, made even more complicated by a marked shift in the very
composition of “we the people.” This fall, _whites will constitute a
minority_
(http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/learning-the-language/2014/08/english-learners_projected_to_.html)
of public-school students in the United States.
“Our” past is now more diverse than we once thought, whether we like it
or not.
It turns out that some Americans don’t like it. A member of the Texas State
Board of Education has _accused_
(http://www.texastribune.org/2014/07/24/texplainer-does-ap-history-contain-common-core/)
the College Board of “
promoting among our students a disdain for American principles and a lack of
knowledge of major American achievements,” like those of the _founding
fathers_
(http://www.texasgopvote.com/issues/stop-big-government/college-board-rewrites-us-history-006850)
and of the _generals_
(http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2014/08/new_ap_us_history_test_infuriates_texas_state_board_
of_ed_members.php) who fought in the Civil War and World War II. The
Republican National Committee says the framework offers _“a radically
revisionist view”_
(http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/rnc-ap-exam-revisionist-history) that
“emphasizes negative aspects of our nation’s
history.” Stanley Kurtz, in National Review, _called_
(http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/386202/how-college-board-politicized-us-history-stanley-kurt
z) it “an attempt to hijack the teaching of U.S. history on behalf of a
leftist political and ideological perspective.”
Disagreement is not a bad thing. But learning history means engaging with
aspects of the past that are troubling, as well as those that are heroic.
There was a time, for example, when historians didn’t worry much about the
slave trade and the emergence of an economy based on forced labor.
Historians likened the plantation to a “school,” and emancipated people as
children let out of class too soon. Only slightly more than a half-century
ago,
historians began to “revise” that narrative, examining sources previously
ignored or unseen, informed by new ideas about race and human agency. More
recently, scholars have revised 19th-century images of the “vanishing Indian,”
a wildly inaccurate narrative that lives on in public monuments and
popular lore, and has implications for public policy.
This essential process of reconsideration and re-evaluation takes place in
all disciplines; imagine a diagnosis from a physician who does not read “
revisionist” medical research.
Revisionism is necessary — and it generates controversy, especially when
new scholarship finds its way into classrooms. But debate over what is
taught in our schools is hardly new. Part of the logic underlying the creation
of Catholic schools in 19th-century America had to do with a public-school
curriculum that took a distinctly Protestant view of religious conflicts and
cultural values. Since the early 20th century, battles have been waged
over the relative place of “history” and “civics” in public education, a
dichotomy that many professional historians don’t even accept.
In 1994, _Lynne Cheney_
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/lynne_v_cheney/index.html)
, a former chairwoman of the National
Endowment for the Humanities, _pronounced_
(http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/n/nash-history.html) the results of a
congressionally mandated set of
national standards in American history “grim and gloomy,” distorted by “
political correctness,” and deficient for paying too much attention to the Ku
Klux Klan and McCarthyism and too little to Robert E. Lee and the Wright
brothers.
The latest accusations arise from belief born of assumption rather than
careful reading. The document is not a curriculum; _in the words of David
Coleman_
(http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/ap/ap-us-history-letter-from-david-coleman.pdf)
, president of the College Board, “it is just a
framework, requiring teachers to populate it with content required by
their local standards and priorities.” Those who assume that America’s
founders are neglected seem not to have actually read the material. The
Declaration of Independence stands front and center alongside the Constitution
in the
section devoted to “experiments with democratic ideas and republican forms
of government,” including those of France, Haiti and Latin America. The
framework makes clear that these “new ideas” included evangelical religion.
The framework even makes a bow to American exceptionalism — noting “the
emergence of distinctly American cultural expressions” in the new republic
and declaring that “the United States developed the world’s first modern
mass democracy.” For good measure, one can find _Washington’s farewell
address_ (http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=15&page=transcript) — not to
mention the _Articles of Confederation_
(http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=3&page=transcript) , state
constitutions, the _Emancipation
Proclamation_
(http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=34&page=transcript)
and the _Four Freedoms_
(http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=70&page=transcript) — in
both the curriculum framework and the _sample
exam_
(http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/ap/ap-us-history-practice-exam.pdf)
released by the College Board.
The critics are unhappy, perhaps, that a once comforting story has become,
in the hands of scholars, more complex, unsettling, provocative and
compelling.
And there’s the rub. Fewer and fewer college professors are teaching the
United States history our grandparents learned — memorizing a litany of
names, dates and facts — and this upsets some people. “College-level work” now
requires attention to context, and change over time; includes greater use
of primary sources; and reassesses traditional narratives. This is work
that requires and builds empathy, an essential aspect of historical thinking.
The educators and historians who worked on the new history framework were
right to emphasize historical thinking as an essential aspect of civic
culture. Their efforts deserve a spirited debate, one that is always open to
revision, rather than ill-informed assumptions or political partisanship.
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[RC] NY Times -The New History Wars
BILROJ via Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community Tue, 02 Sep 2014 12:37:07 -0700
