By Tom Robotham
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free…, it expects what never was and never will be. ~ Thomas Jefferson.
Last month in this space, I wrote an essay called “History Lessons.” My inspiration for doing so was the mass of misinformation that flooded social and traditional media amidst the controversy over the Confederate flag.
More recently I’ve been reminded that the widespread ignorance of the causes of the Civil War is a reflection of a bigger problem. As the country becomes increasingly polarized on a wide range of issues, the teaching of history is growing more and more politicized—and thus, distorted.
A case in point: Recently, in response to heavy criticisms from the political right, the College Board revised its standards for Advanced Placement American history. Conservatives think that AP curricula of late have put too much emphasis on slavery and violence against American Indians, while downplaying the glories of the “Founding Fathers” and American triumphalism.
In a way this is nothing new. During the so-called “Reagan Revolution,” there was a similar effort to revise history curricula. But the degree to which it has been politicized has ebbed and flowed, depending on the spirit of the times. Today the dispute seems to be at high tide. Ideologues on the right and left alike want history to reflect their passionately held beliefs, while vilifying the other side.
Currently I tend to put more blame the right for over-simplification because for the last 35 years, they have been the dominant force in politics—so much so that they have radically redefined the terms “liberal” and “conservative.” If you doubt this, take a look at the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower. By any standards of the time, he was a conservative. And yet, this Republican war hero warned of the dangers of the military-industrial complex, defended the right of workers to unionize, called for an expansion of social security, and took other positions that today would be regarded as liberal, if not downright socialist. Today, far-right Republicans would have the history books ignore all of this.
That said, I suspect that if left-wing ideologues were in power, they would be equally demanding of conformity to the party line. By left-wing ideologues, incidentally, I don’t mean the likes of Bernie Sanders, who just makes a hell of a lot of sense. Forty years ago, he would have been regarded as a mainstream liberal. I mean the unthinking PC crowd that shuts down debate as quickly as Rush Limbaugh.
With this in mind, let’s consider how history has been taught in our schools over the last century or so.
Can we all acknowledge, first of all, that up until the 1960s American history curricula were based more on myth than on fact? It was a story, by and large, of “great” white men: Columbus, John Smith, William Bradford, Paul Revere, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Abraham Lincoln, and so on down the line. But it was also a story of average citizens: stout-hearted men with supportive wives and rosy-cheeked children who settled the frontier, fought off savage Indians, and eventually built the greatest nation on earth. In this grand epic, Indians, African-Americans and women were largely extras on the set, as it were—though some, like Betsy Ross and George Washington Carver, had bit parts. At any rate, as the old narrative went, from the founding of the colonies through our victory over Germany and Japan in World War II, we proved again and again to be a beacon of freedom and hope for all mankind.
After the counter-cultural movements of the ‘60s a new generation of historians began to challenge this narrative, and by 1980, when Howard Zinn published A People’s History of the United States, an alternative view had been firmly established. To people on the far left, the Founding Fathers personified the white male patriarchy, Abraham Lincoln was actually a racist, and the history of America was nothing more than a story of oppression and brutality.
There are nuggets of truth in all of these narratives. But it should be self-evident that the overarching truth lies somewhere in the middle.
To those who want to restore the “great-men” narrative, I would say this: You cannot ignore the fact that the fabric of American history is stained with blood. I would argue, in fact, that downplaying the moral crimes that have been committed in the name of progress actually threatens the welfare of our nation. Just as individuals cannot hope to grow and realize their full potential if they do not confront their own shortcomings, so a nation cannot hope to do so if it collectively ignores its sins, past and present. Our history must include the ugly facts: The slaughter of Indians and theft of their land; the enslavement of African-Americans; the oppression of women; the exploitation of workers, and the abuse of natural resources, among many others. To acknowledge and explore the ramifications of these things is not a denigration of our country but rather a sign of courage.
To the other side, I would call for a different kind of acknowledgment, starting with the need for a nuanced assessment of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence and established the Constitution. Of course they were deeply flawed—racist, sexist and elitist, by today’s standards. But their brilliance laid the foundation for one of the greatest ideas in the history of civilization: that all men are created equal and entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is a testament to the greatness of this idea that we have progressed—quite dramatically—toward realization of the idea that all people are created equal and are entitled to natural rights. Victories in the spheres of women’s rights, civil rights for blacks, and most recently, gay rights, are but three examples of this.
The greatest threat to our Republic today, in other words, is not any particular group, but a widespread and willful ignorance in the service of rigid ideologies. Nowhere is this willful ignorance more evident than in social media, which is littered with ideological memes from both the right and the left—statements that are often factually inaccurate and almost always oversimplifications, at best. In light of a recent Pew Research study revealing that a majority of Millennials get their news from Facebook, this is gravely important.
The widespread sharing of memes is revealing, not only because their assertions are often untrue, but because even when they are true, they reflect intellectual laziness. In our dumbed-down society, more and more people would rather parrot other people’s statements than take the time to research and write their own thoughtful commentaries about social and political issues.
Worse still, a lot of people scanning social media tend to find these memes more palatable than lengthier, nuanced commentaries. Again this is nothing new. We’ve always been a nation that’s in love with slogans—“Give me liberty, or give me death”; “In God We Trust,” and so on—but not so fond of examining their deeper meanings. And heaven forbid we come to grips with their inherent contradictions. We like “history” that fits on a bumper sticker.
The left has at times been as guilty as the right, having tried since the 1960s to throw the baby out with the bathwater, as the saying goes, by rejecting great works of intellectual history as nothing more than books by “dead white men.” To them I would say, yes, the curriculum needed to be broadened. But the value of reading the classics from Plato onward should not be devalued and dismissed.
This is true of the study of the humanities in general. As for history in particular, I would argue that we cannot fully understand it unless we read narratives from a variety of viewpoints—from the conservative historian Paul Johnson, for example, to left-wingers like Howard Zinn—and then formulate, but continue to question, our own interpretations.
Alas, one rarely hears great intellectual debates in the public square anymore. Instead, we have right-wingers repeating what they’ve heard on FOX News—a driver of anti-intellectualism, if ever there was one—and left-wingers posting quotations by Noam Chomsky without ever having read one of his books.
We cannot hope to overcome this disease of willful ignorance without radical changes in our education system—and those changes must begin with the teaching of history, not as an advancement of some ideology but as an ongoing effort to understand the forces that have shaped our individual and collective values, for better and for worse. If we don’t understand where we came from, we cannot hope to understand where we are going.
