JillMatrix comments on George Will’s comments about why kids are still doing horribly at History.
And George Will says, I sh*t you not, that a major reason that U.S. students are not good at history is that the information is being kept from them because “so many of the heros are white men.”
She takes his comment as meaning that “American history studies have been diluted by including facts about women and people of other ethnicities.” She demurs, feeling that it’s mainly that people don’t value history.
She may be right. But let me make a feeble stab at defending George Will. I wrote the first draft of this in her comments, but I wrote enough to prompt me to write it here.
History, to be useful and interesting, must make sense. It must hang together, have meaning, create a tapestry. Threads and fabric swatches are interesting, maybe even pretty, but not real useful.
In that sense, history as a Bunch of Dead White Guys may actually make some sense. That’s not a politically correct thing to say, but to the extent that history is about facts, not niceness or politeness or making people feel good, I think it’s true.
Yes, it’s neat to know what life was like for a Jewish Lesbian of Color in 18th Century Vermont. I even daresay that people should know about that person. People should know a lot of things, but there’s limited time (not to mention, to echo JillMatrix’s point, interest) to learn history, so you have to pick and choose your battles.
The fact is, very few Jewish Lesbians of Color in 18th Century were elected President or had much influence outside of their immediate friends and family. That doesn’t mean our hypothetical subject wasn’t a good, valuable, worthwhile person, just not a good, valuable, worthwhile historic figure. It’s neat to know about people of all sorts, including this hypothetical person, but it doesn’t give you much sense of the flow of history outside of that one person’s life.
Dead White Guys have been in charge of things, both in this country and outside of it, for quite a while. It’s not stretching a point to say that they’ve had a disproportionate amount of historical influence. That may be (in fact, certainly is) unjust, but so was the San Francisco Earthquake. Pretending that either didn’t happen doesn’t teach you anything.
What Will may be driving at in a clumsy way is that by trying to make sure that half the people taught about in American History are non-white, non-male, non-Protestant, and non-rich, we’ve taught kids about a lot of fascinating individuals, but not much about history, or how the times of Squanto relate to the times of Frederick Douglass relate to the times of Susan B. Anthony (let alone to the times of a lot less significant individuals, carefully chosen for their ethnicity, gender, or interest to the writers of the history texts).
That’s not to say that Squanto, Douglass, or Anthony, or a random slave, a random settler woman, a random Native American warrior, or a random Hispanic settler in 17th Century California weren’t good, useful and/or brilliant people, or that students shouldn’t be taught about them. But if they are taught about them at the exclusion of Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln or either Roosevelt, something’s pretty important is going to be lost from that historic tapestry.
We’re not talking about memorizing dates and wars and Presidents — or maybe we are, because even though I sucked at doing that, it’s useful to know in what order things happened, if nothing else. Memorizing Presidents for the sake of doing so is kind of goofy — just like memorizing state capitols is. But it’s useful to know that Jackson came after Jefferson, but before Lincoln, because, damn, it’s hard to understand the Civil War, the Westward Expansion, or the international relations of the newborn US without knowing that.
What’s happened in developing current history curricula is that it’s been a matter of picking and choosing folks on a basis other than “How does this person fit into the story of the US? How does knowing about who this person was and what they did help us understand what came before, and what came after?” Instead, people are chosen to fit in with Black History Month, or with other politically polite and esteem-enhancing criteria in mind. History thus becomes a way to make people feel good about themselves, or to provide role models to people of their own race, ethnicity, religion or gender.
But that’s not what history is about. History is about learning how we got to where we are today, and maybe where we’re headed tomorrow. It’s impossible, perhaps, to divorce history from ideology, but to simply give in and let ideology dictate history is to put us in the same camp as the old Politburo hacks, frantically erasing Trotsky out of the chronicles of the Revolution, and then changing the spin on Stalin after Kruschev took over, and then damning Kruschev when he, in turn, fell. Historical thought always evolves with time, but the more tinkering you explicitly do with it, the more of a house of cards you’re building.
It may very well be that a coherent, useful, educational curriculum of history can be developed that studies (if not celebrates, because history is not about celebration, either) historical figures in proportion to their modern presence in the population. We’ve only been trying for thirty years to do so, and much of that effort has been distorted by political concerns outweighing historical ones. We should keep trying — but we should be realistic as well. Dead White Guys have run things for a long time (that’s kind of the point of a lot of rhetoric from the Left, right?). To then try to teach how things have been in the past while not talking about Dead White Guys seems sort of … well, unrealistic.
Well said, Dave. Well said, indeed. Bravo.
De nada. Though I expected to hear your comments on the Batman Beyond post rather than this one … 😉
Well, MY high school days were pre-PC and in the early ’70s the mostly-White Male history still wasn’t coherent or very interesting. And I like history. What might have helped? Threads of history that were almost totally ignored. The history and interconnectiveness of technological development, as in “Connections”. Emphasize the value of technology by showing how life sucks for 99% of the population without it. Military history, something also ignored in the nuts-and-bolts sense. Atrocity, and not just those of the West but the ordinary atrocities of everyone else, to give the kiddies a sense of progress. At least these days even the vilest people will feel a need to cover things up. Highlighting bumbling incompetence and lucky flukes as well as genius, because they humanize things.
I’m certainly not claiming that the DWM school of history curricula is a panacea, largely because history is rarely taught well in the first place, regardless of the curriculum. But it provides a framework that, if done properly, can teach a coherent continuity of events and people.
“Connections” was a great series and, were I teaching history, I’d be making a lot of use of it. I’m not sure technology alone can provide all the historical context needed, but it’s a goodly chunk of it.
And I have no problems with the rest of what you say.
I knew a sales person for one of the major suppliers of school textbooks. He told me that the entire industry is geared to Texas and California. Those two states not only account for large-volume purchases, but for some reason that I forgot, they buy early in the year, as opposed to the rest of the country. The books for the entire country are created to suit those markets. So the textbooks have a heavy emphasis on high-lighting minority influence on american history in a disproportinate way ( example: the only illustration of a cattle round -up is a mexican cowgirl.) They are also written in a much more basic and less detailed manner to deliver to a growing population of ESL students.
Back when I was in the “ed biz,” I remember the same statement about Texas/California. It’s a case where one conservative value (let the market decide) comes into conflict with another (let local choice prevail). It also makes it all the more dangerous if one or the other state gets a particular ideological bug up its butt about something in the curriculum (e.g., creationism, minority representation, the role of immigration).
Ran across an interesing article in the Monitor yesterday (not interesting enough to blog about, but in this context …) about how Texas state history courses in elementary and high school are changing, to reflect the increasing number of students of Mexican decent for whom the traditional stereotype of Davy Crockett fending off mustachioed Federales at the Alamo is not the historical stereotype of choice.
An interesting observation (speculation? bit of information?) on the writing level.
How will they reconcile the American version: Davy and two dozen guys and a dog vs. 10,000 federales with lots of cannon, with the Mexican one: Santa Ana and two platoons of peone recruits with a couple of six pounders vs. tons of crazed Texican veterans shoulder to shoulder in the fort?
Only a slight exaggeration.