Re-Defining and Re-Writing History in the Classroom

Our little skirmish over sex-ed might just be a practice scrimmage in the culture wars, if a recent development in Florida is any indication. Without attracting much attention in the press, that sunny state last month passed a law that outlawed "historical interpretation" in the public schools.

Common Dreams calls them on it this week:

Although U.S. students are typically taught a sanitized version of history in which the inherent superiority and benevolence of the United States is rarely challenged, the social and political changes unleashed in the 1960s have opened up some space for a more honest accounting of our past. But even these few small steps taken by some teachers toward collective critical self-reflection are too much for many Americans to bear.

So, as part of an education bill signed into law by Gov. Jeb Bush, Florida has declared that “American history shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed.” That factual history, the law states, shall be viewed as “knowable, teachable, and testable.”

Stop. Think about that. A law says that history shall be viewed as factual. You understand why they needed that?

Florida’s lawmakers are not only prescribing a specific view of US history that must be taught (my favorite among the specific commands in the law is the one about instructing students on “the nature and importance of free enterprise to the United States economy”), but are trying to legislate out of existence any ideas to the contrary. They are not just saying that their history is the best history, but that it is beyond interpretation. In fact, the law attempts to suppress discussion of the very idea that history is interpretation. Florida's Fear of History: New Law Undermines Critical Thinking

Compare this to the debate over the press. Conservatives have repeated the phrase "liberal media" so many times that not only have they started to believe it, but the media have bent over backwards to prove that they're fair and balanced, often reporting lies as equivalant to truth in order to avoid the appearance of bias. At the same time, liberals looking at the mainstream media see little beyond a government propaganda outlet, talking heads reading administration press releases as if they were real reporting. Biased left? Biased right? You'll find people who say each of those things.

And that's when you're talking about things that happened yesterday, things that living people saw and can verify or criticize. Imagine the same complaints, only now you're talking about events that happened a hundred or two hundred years ago. You can't verify it, you can't deny it. If the textbook says he cut down the cherry tree, he cut down the cherry tree, and that's all there is to it.

The fundamental fallacy of the law is in the underlying assumption that “factual” and “constructed” are mutually exclusive in the study of history. There certainly are many facts about history that are widely, and sometimes even unanimously, agreed upon. But how we arrange those facts into a narrative to describe and explain history is clearly a construction, an interpretation. That’s the task of historians -- to assess factual assertions about the past, weave them together in a coherent narrative, and construct an explanation of how and why things happened.

For example, it’s a fact that Europeans began coming in significant numbers to North America in the 17th century. Were they peaceful settlers or aggressive invaders? That’s interpretation, a construction of the facts into a narrative with an argument for one particular way to understand those facts.

It’s also a fact that once those Europeans came, the indigenous people died in large numbers. Was that an act of genocide? Whatever one’s answer, it will be an interpretation, a construction of the facts to support or reject that conclusion.

In contemporary history, has U.S. intervention in the Middle East been aimed at supporting democracy or controlling the region’s crucial energy resources? Would anyone in a free society want students to be taught that there is only one way to construct an answer to that question?

And you can't meaningfully talk about history without some interpretation. You will call a group of people "fierce," or "peace-loving," you will emphasize their wild pagan rituals or their patient agricultural practices. Neither is wrong, neither is fiction or untruth, but your choice of words certainly affects the conclusions that students will draw.

The Los Angeles Times had an opinion piece by a historian that might clear up a little bit of it.

... [I]n an unprecedented move, the president's brother approved a law barring revisionist history in Florida public schools. "The history of the United States shall be taught as genuine history and shall not follow the revisionist or postmodernist viewpoints of relative truth," declares Florida's Education Omnibus Bill, signed by Gov. Jeb Bush. "American history shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed." [Note: the words "revisionist" and "postmodernist" were removed from the final wording of the bill, after this piece was written]

Ironically, the Florida law is itself revisionist history. Once upon a time, it theorizes, history — especially about the founding of the country — was based on facts. But sometime during the 1960s, all that changed. American historians supposedly started embracing newfangled theories of moral relativism and French postmodernism, abandoning their traditional quest for facts, truth and certainty.

The result was a flurry of new interpretations, casting doubt on the entire past as we had previously understood it. Because one theory was as good as another, then nothing could be true or false. God, nation, family and school: It was all up for grabs.

There's just one problem with this history-of-our-history: It's wrong. All history is 'revisionist'

The author of this piece, Dr. Jonathan Zimmerman, is director of the History of Education Program in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences in the Professions of the Steinhardt School of Education at New York University. His research focuses on cultural conflict in American public education.

Hardly a brainchild of the flower-power '60s, the concept of historical interpretation has been at the heart of our profession from the 1920s onward. Before that time, to be sure, some historians believed that they could render a purely factual and objective account of the past. But most of them had given up on what historian Charles Beard called the "noble dream" by the interwar period, when scholars came to realize that the very selection of facts was an act of interpretation.

That's why Cornell's Carl Becker chose the title "Everyman His Own Historian" for his 1931 address to the American Historical Assn., probably the most famous short piece of writing in our profession. In it, Becker explained why "Everyman" — that is, the average layperson — inevitably interpreted the facts of his or her own life, remembering certain elements and forgetting (or distorting) others.

For instance, try to recount everything you did yesterday. Not just a few things, like going to work or eating dinner or reading the newspaper, but everything. You can't. Even if you kept a diary and recorded what you did each minute, you would inevitably omit some detail: a sound in your ear, a twitch in your nose, a passing glance of your eyes. A 24-hour video camera might pick up these physical actions, but it could never record your thoughts.

So when somebody asks what you did yesterday, you select a certain few facts about your day and spin a story around them.

As do professional historians. They may draw on a wider array of facts and theories but, just like "Everyman," they choose certain data points and omit others, as well they must.

(Interesting -- "Everyman" the protagonist, eight years before Joyce's HCE.)

History as a list of everything that happened would ... not be very interesting, let's say. Clearly, the goal is to extract knowledge, a narrative, a way of understanding the past -- the idea that history is simply a collection of facts is naive. And the idea that some politicians would legislate that error as fact should scare you.

Becker was an optimist. Although historians could never determine the capital-T "Truth," he wrote, they could get progressively closer to it by asking new questions, collecting new facts and constructing new interpretations.

Nevertheless, he concluded his 1931 address on a pessimistic note: Unless the profession engaged lay readers — unless, that is, we taught the public about what we actually do — Americans would reject history itself, taking comfort in banal pieties and sugarcoated myths.

And surely one of the biggest myths of all is that history is simply about "facts." This year marks the 75th anniversary of Becker's famous speech, yet Americans appear no nearer to understanding that all pasts are "constructed," that all facts require interpretation and that all history is "revisionist" history.

Demagogic politicians are certainly at fault for this situation, but historians bear a good deal of blame too. Unlike Becker's generation of scholars, who worked hard to cultivate a lay readership, most of us write only for each other. Is it any wonder that the public has no idea about how we go about choosing topics, identifying sources and arriving at conclusions?

"It should be a relief to us to renounce omniscience," Becker wrote 75 years ago, "to recognize that every generation, our own included, will, must inevitably, understand the past and anticipate the future in the light of its own restricted experience."

This essay is really about the separation of popular and academic thought, which, in my opinion, is at the bottom of a lot of our current troubles. It seems to me there has been a deliberate derogation of educated people in our society, with the (intended) consequence of keeping the larger part of the population uncritical, unknowledgeable, and easy to manipulate. Academics have one kind of knowledge (which, trust me, is used by those in power), ordinary people are spoon-fed another.

To my mind, the re-defining and re-writing of history are more dangerous than the re-defining and re-writing of science that we have seen in recent years. Whereas science constantly improves our knowledge of nature and our place in it, history gives us a sense of identity, it tells us who we are in a personal way, where we fit into the story of the human race on the planet earth. If we give politicians the responsibility of picking which "facts" will be acceptable in the classroom, what is the probability that they will not select perspectives that serve their own ideological ends?