“Well, it is a history book!” the judge retorted. And we nudged each other, realizing we were going to win this case. Eventually, in a decision the American Library Association ranks as one of its “notable First Amendment court cases,” the judge ordered Mississippi to adopt our book for the standard six-year period and supply it to any school system, public or private, that requested it, like any other adopted book.8
Although we won the lawsuit, that experience proved to me that history can be a weapon, and it had been used against my students. This book helps teachers arm students with critical reading and thinking skills—historiography, for example—so they will not be defenseless. Indeed, they can even learn to do history themselves.
A LESSON FROM VERMONT
After eight years, I moved to the University of Vermont. Again, I found myself teaching first-year undergraduates, this time in huge classes in Introductory Sociology. I enjoyed these freshman classes, not least because they opened a wonderful window on the world of high school. The view was mighty discouraging at times. My UVM students—as the University of Vermont is known—showed me that teaching and learning “BS history” in high school was and is a national problem. These students were also ignorant of even the basic facts of our past, as were my Mississippi students, despite the hours spent in most high schools memorizing them.
In 1989, their ignorance astounded me in a course I taught intended for advanced undergraduates in education, history, and sociology. On the first day of class I gave my students a quiz. It contained some comical items (some posted at my website, http://sundown.afro.illinois.edu/), but also perfectly straightforward questions like this one: “The War in Vietnam was fought between _____ and ____.” To my astonishment, 22% of my students replied “North and South Korea!”
Now, please don’t infer that something special—and specially wrong—has eroded history education in Vermont. The University of Vermont is a national institution; only 40% of its students come from within the state. Moreover, repeated national studies show that high school students learn history exceptionally badly. In 2003, for instance, the National Assessment of Educational Progress granted “advanced” status in U.S. history to only 1% of high school seniors. College graduates did little better. In 2000, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni commissioned the Center for Survey Research at the University of Connecticut to administer a 34-item “high school level American history test” to 556 seniors at 55 top colleges and universities. “Nearly 80% … received a D or F,” according to a summary. More than a third didn’t know that the Constitution established the three-way division of power in the U.S. government; 99%, on the other hand, could identify “Beavis and Butt-Head” as adolescent television cartoon characters.9 College courses failed to fill in the gaps in their knowledge, partly because many college students never take a history course, it having been so boring in high school.10
University of Vermont students were particularly bad, however, in learning and applying the basic concepts of sociology. Indeed, they were so bad at it that I coined a new term for the syndrome that they exhibited: soclexia. This learning disorder makes it very difficult for its victims to grasp the basic idea of sociology. It may be genetic; certainly it strikes certain racial and economic groups more than others. Children from white (and Asian American) upper-class and upper-middle-class families are especially vulnerable.11
What is the basic idea of sociology? It is this: Social structure pushes people around, influences their careers, and even affects how they think. I was unprepared for the level of soclexia I experienced in Vermont. My Tougaloo students readily understood that social structure pushed people around. Not one of their parents was an architect, for example, because no school in the Deep South in their parents’ generation both taught architecture and admitted African Americans. So my Tougaloo students knew how social structure might influence careers. Then, too, neighbors of theirs—white children—had been their friends when they were four and five years old, but by the time they were fourteen and fifteen a barrier had gone up between them. My black undergraduates could see that this racial bias was hardly innate; rather, it showed that social structure affects how people think. Hence they were open to the sociological perspective.
My UVM students, in contrast, were very different. To be sure, they could memorize. If I asked them on a quiz, “What is the basic idea of sociology?” they would reply, “Social structure pushes people around, influences their careers, even affects how they think.” But when I asked them to apply that idea to their own lives or to the next topic we dealt with in introductory sociology, most were clueless.
To understand their soclexia, it helps to know that during the years I taught there (1975–1996), UVM usually ranked #1 as the most expensive state university in America, both in-state and out of state. Hence, it drew extraordinarily rich students. In 1996, the last year I collected data (and no one else ever did), the median family income for out-of-state students at the University of Vermont (and most students came from out of state) was $123,500 (about $160,000 in 2008 dollars). In that year, the national median family income was $42,300 (about $55,000 in 2008 dollars). Only 5.5% of all families made $123,500 or more. Yet half of all out-of-state families at the University of Vermont came from this elite income group. The mean family income of UVM students was higher still.12
Despite being so rich, my students believed that they—not their parents’ social positions—were responsible for their own success—which consisted mostly of their having been admitted to the University of Vermont. They pushed social structure around, most felt, and if some people were poor, that was their own damn fault—they simply hadn’t pushed social structure around enough. Most of my students had no understanding that for children of their social class background, gaining admission to college was not an outstanding personal accomplishment but merely meeting expectations—going along with the flow.
I tried to show them that their understanding of the social world was itself a product of social structure—indeed, was entirely predictable from their membership in the upper-middle and lower-upper classes. In short, their view that social structure made no difference was the ideology “appropriate” to their position in social structure. It is precisely these classes that hold the idea that class makes no difference.
Their class position was not the sole cause of their soclexia. Their high school education contributed as well. Not their high school course-work in sociology—few high schools offer sociology, even as an elective. But there is one course that everyone takes and that purports to be about our society—American history. Unfortunately, American history as presented in high school textbooks (and by teachers who rely on them) not only leaves out social class entirely, it also avoids any analysis of what causes what in our society, past or present. Thus, American history is a key breeding ground of soclexia.
Indeed, in my experience, the more history a student has taken in high school, the less able s/he is to think sociologically. Some college history professors agree. A friend who taught the U.S. history survey at Vermont nicknamed its two semesters “Iconoclasm I and II,” because he had to break the icons—the false images of the past that students carried with them from their high school history courses—to make room for more accurate information. He actually preferred students from other countries, who knew no American history at all or, as is often the case, knew it more accurately and more analytically than do American high school graduates.
In no other discipline do college professors prefer students with less preparation! On the contrary, the math department is delighted when high school graduates have taken a fifth year of math. After giving them a test to ensure that they have retained what they learned, the department places such students in advanced instead of introductory calculus. Shakespeare professors are similarly happy to teach students who have already read Lear in high school, along with the more usual Romeo and Juliet. While they may not place such a person in “Advanced Shakespeare” and
may teach Lear differently, nevertheless, the student has read the play and thought about it and will be a pleasure to teach.
Not so in history.
I responded to my students’ ignorance of American history just as I had in Mississippi: I visited nearby high schools to watch teachers in American history classrooms and studied the textbooks they used. I found that most of them relied far too much on these textbooks. This was not a local Vermont problem. Research shows that students spend more class time with their textbooks in history—reading the books in class, discussing them, answering the 60 questions at the end of each chapter—than in any other subject in the curriculum. This finding staggered me. I had thought the winner (or rather, loser) would be something very different—perhaps geometry. After all, students can hardly interview their parents about geometry. They can hardly use the web, or the library, the census, and so on, to learn about geometry. But all these resources, and many more besides, are perfectly relevant to the study of history.
When I studied the textbooks that so dominated these courses, my concern deepened. Although American history is full of gripping and important stories, these books were dull. Their basic storyline was: the United States started out great and has been getting better ever since! Only without the exclamation point. They failed to let voices from the past speak; instead, they told everything themselves, in a boring monotone.
Few of the teachers I watched supplemented the textbooks, despite their soporific impact. In many cases, I came to learn, teachers didn’t go beyond the book because they didn’t know how. History has more teachers teaching out of field than any other subject. According to a national survey, 13% never took a single college history course; only 40% had majored in history or a history-relevant discipline like American Studies, sociology, or political science.13 Such a travesty cannot be imagined in math, science, or English. Such woefully underprepared teachers use textbooks as crutches. I do not mean to slur all history teachers, not at all. Many teach history because they love it and think it is important. Unfortunately, some teachers who would love to go beyond the textbook with their students feel they cannot, because their students have to take “standardized” multiple-choice tests at the end of the year based on the factoids with which textbooks abound.
As a result of this textbook-centric approach, many high school students come to hate history. In survey after national survey, when they list their favorite subject, history always comes in last. Students consider it “irrelevant,” “borr-r-ring.” When they can, they avoid it. Not every class, not every district, of course. Hopefully, yours is the exception. But across the nation, history/social studies does not fare well. As it is usually taught, I believe students are right to dislike it.
Students from out-groups hate history with a special passion and do especially poorly in it. But even affluent young white males are bored by most American history courses in high school.
WHY HISTORY IS IMPORTANT TO STUDENTS
Yet history is crucial. It should be taught in high school, partly because five-sixths of all Americans never take a course in American history after they leave high school. What our citizens learn there forms the core of what they know of our past.
The first thing that students do not learn about American history is why studying it is important. Teachers must go beyond the old saw by the philosopher George Santayana, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”14 This cliché won’t do. Indeed, it is a mystification. The phrase itself is wrong, implying that knowing about the past somehow automatically makes us smarter. Consider the equal and opposite saying by the philosopher Georg Hegel, “People and governments have never learned anything from history.”15 Moreover, Santayana’s saying sweeps conflict under the rug. My Tougaloo students—and their white counterparts at Ole Miss—were not repeating Mississippi’s history of white supremacy because they could not remember the past. They were repeating it because they did remember the past—as it had been misrepresented to them in school. To put this another way, who wrote the history students are asked to recall, and who did not—and for what purpose—can make a world of difference to how it influences the present.
There are much better reasons for learning about history. Once we come to some agreement—not necessarily total—as to why the field is important, that agreement can inform how we should go about teaching it. I submit that the course is gravely important, because its purpose is to help students prepare to do their job as Americans. Students may grow up to be school bus drivers, computer programmers, or CEOs, but what is their job as Americans? Surely it is to bring into being the America of the future.
What does that task entail? Some vision of a good society is required: a society that allows and encourages its members to be all they can be.16 A society enough in harmony with the planet that it can maintain itself over the long run. A society enough at peace with other countries that it does not live in fear of attack. Students might go beyond these basics, perhaps to some vision of the “beloved community.” Their job as Americans—and ours—then consists of figuring out what policies help us move toward that community. What should the United States do about global warming? What should our policy be toward gay marriage? Regarding the next issue—the debate that is sure to engulf us next year, whatever it may be—what position should we take, and what concrete steps to implement it?
Every issue, every suggestion, every element of the America of the future entails an assertion of causation. “We must do X to achieve goal Y.” Of course history is full of causation—and arguments about causation.
Even when an event seems to be new, the causes of the acts and feelings are deeply embedded in the past. Thus, to understand an event—an election, an act of terror, a policy decision about the environment, whatever—we must start in the past.
Unfortunately, high school textbooks in American history present the past as one damn thing after another. Few of the facts are memorable, because they are not shown as related. Therefore, most high school graduates have no inkling of causation in history. Consequently, they cannot use the past to illuminate the present—cannot think coherently about social life.
Why are textbooks compendiums of fact rather than arguments about causation? I don’t think it’s due to an upper-class conspiracy to keep us stupid, although it might be. One problem is precisely that there are arguments about causation. There are far fewer arguments about facts. So let’s just stick with the facts. Another problem is that causation continues to the present, and arguments about the present are by definition controversial. Moreover, as the second edition of Lies My Teacher Told Me shows, high school history textbooks often aren’t really written by the people whose names are on their title pages, especially after their first editions. The gnomes in the bowels of the publishing companies who write them aren’t hired to interpret the past or sort out causation in the past and don’t have the credentials for that task.
For all these reasons, textbooks downplay what causes what. Nevertheless, learning what causes what is crucial for our job as Americans.
So is critical thinking. Again, history textbooks—and courses centered on “learning” history textbooks—downplay critical thinking. Almost never does a textbook suggest more than one possible answer and invite students to assess evidence for each. Instead, they tell the right answers, over and over, in their sleep-inducing godlike monotone. We shall see (Chapter 5) that sometimes no one knows the right answer, yet history textbooks present one anyway!
A crucial ingredient of critical thinking is historiography. Earlier, talking about Mississippi, we noted that who wrote history, who did not, and for what purpose can make all the difference. That assertion comes from historiography—the study of the writing of history—and every high school graduate should know both the term and how to “do” it. (See Chapter 3.)
Perhaps the most basic reason why students need to take history/social studies is this: history is power. That I saw firsthand in Mississippi. Histo
ry can be a weapon. Students who do not know their own history or how to think critically about historical assertions will be ignorant and helpless before someone who does claim to know it. Students need to be able to fight back. This line of thought is a strong motivator, especially for “have-not” students,17 but all students enjoy “wielding” history.
There are still other reasons to learn history. The past supplies models for our behavior, for example. From the sagas of Lewis and Clark, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Helen Keller, Rachel Carson, and a thousand others, students can draw inspiration, courage, and sometimes still-relevant causes. We’re not talking hero worship here, however, and all of the individuals named above have their imperfections. Present them whole. Instead of suggesting heroes as models, suggest heroic actions. Typically people perform heroically at a key moment, not so heroically at other moments. Students need to do accurate history, coupled with historiography, to sort out in which ways their role models are worth following. Recognizing both the good and not so good element within historical individuals can also make it easier to accept that societies also contain the good and not so good.18
History can (and should) also make us less ethnocentric. Ethnocentrism is the belief that one’s own culture is the best and that other societies and cultures should be ranked highly only to the degree that they resemble ours. Every successful society manifests ethnocentrism. Swedes, for example, think their nation is the best, and with reason: Sweden has a slightly higher standard of living than the United States, and on at least one survey of happiness Swedes scored happier than the American average. But Swedes can never convince themselves that theirs is the dominant culture, dominant military, or dominant economy. Americans can—and without even being ethnocentric. After all, our GNP is the largest, Americans spend more on our military than all other nations combined, and for years athletes in countries around the world have high-fived each other after a really good dive, or dunk, or bobsled run. They didn’t learn that from their home culture, or from Sweden, but from us, the dominant culture on the planet.19 It is but a small step to conclude that ours is the best country on the planet. Hence, the United States leads the world in ethnocentrism.
Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History Page 3