History Lessons
History is written by the victors. Ten people could witness the same event, and if you asked them all afterwards what happened, you would probably get eleven different versions. Much of what we read in history books is from the American perspective, and over the years the text has been trimmed to include only the most favorable parts. Today’s post looks first at the book, History Lessons: How Textbooks from Around the World Portray U.S. History
Dana Lindaman and Kyle Ward have assembled selections from textbooks that are used in different parts of the world in order to give a different perspective on some events in “American History” that most students raised in the United States would be familiar with. Although this book is not specifically about education, it does serve to show how the curriculum of American textbooks, especially in history, present an isolationist view of the world. It is fascinating to read about events such as the American Revolution in a French textbook, or the Iranian hostage crisis in an Iranian textbook, the Spanish-American War in a Filipino textbook, or even Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine in a Brazilian textbook. While you may be used to reading the American slant on history, it is also interesting to see the bias that appears elsewhere, such as the portrayal of US-DPRK relations in the early 90s from a North Korean textbook with Americans as aggressors and even uses the word sanctions in quotation marks – although my favorite aspect was how every time the US was mentioned it included epithets such as “lying”, “dishonest” and “swine”.
In the introduction to the book, the editors point out some of the problems with the way that history is taught in American schools by pointing out that students in other nations seem to know much more about the rest of the world than Americans do by comparison, despite the fact that those students usually have hundreds more years of their country’s history to learn:
Americans, in sharp contrast, seem to know relatively little about other countries and cultures. This isolationist tendency is nowhere more apparent than within our own educational system…If we wish to move beyond judgment and toward understanding, we must honestly consider other perspectives.
I have often felt that the average American has a very limited view of the world and how America fits into it – myself included, as I am certainly no expert! I do see an importance for students to have an understanding that there are other perspectives in the world and major historical events have many sides to them. Looking back on my own education, I remember taking several history survey courses – the style, common to middle schools, where the teaching begins with the earliest settlers of the North American continent crossing the land bridge into what is now Alaska and Canada; we would then jump ahead to the Colombus’ “discovery” of the “New World” with perhaps a mention that the Vikings may have previously visited and little to no mention of the thriving Native American communities that were in place for thousands of years (all that usually occurred in the first 3-4 weeks). We would then quickly gloss over major events in American history, seeming to always focus on wars, and would usually run out of school days somewhere during World War II – I don’t recall ever even getting into the Kennedy assassination and only once the mention that an era such as McCarthyism ever existed. Although the textbook may have covered events as recent as only 5 years before, the end of the school year usually interrupted that part of the curriculum. It always seemed rushed with no opportunity to discuss topics in-depth. Lindaman and Ward also mention this problem:
By reducing history to a series of inoffensive facts and figures, no matter how attractively packaged, textbook publishers are effectively judging students incapable of discussing and debating important topics and issues.
I am a firm believer in the concept that there is a self-fulfilling prophecy inherent in education – that students will live up to the reasonable expectations that are made of them. Sadly, schools seem to be pushing the rote memorization of dates and facts as opposed to having students engage with the content and really understand history. (Over at the Open Education blog, they recently discussed this effect rote learning within the “Google generation”.) Even more frustrating are my memories of repeating the same material in sixth through ninth grades. Different teachers, different books, but the exact same materials taught in the same way, even though those 4 years were spent at 3 different schools, 2 public and 1 private. This basic informational teaching is what is most responsible for students’ dislike of history – at least in my case.
There are at least two disastrous outcomes of this approach towards teaching history: 1) History becomes compartmentalized into an abstract string of facts that is not relevant to the world in which we live today. Students are not afforded the opportunity to explore the topics and apply their knowledge to other events using their analytical skills, but instead must rely on only rote memorization of facts. 2) It fosters a separationist attitude in American students which will become increasingly damaging as the world grows more and more globally connected. The arrogance and short-sightedness of this is not just leaving children behind from the changing global environment, but also creating reasons for antagonism from and with other nations.
So what should be done about this? Is it more important to know all of the dates and locations of Civil War battles, or about foreign policies in the last century that were designed to keep the United States dominant in the Western Hemisphere, or even events in the Middle East from the last 50 years that have made the area so unstable today. In order to be responsible, worldly citizens, shouldn’t our students be informed of historical events that are still occurring today, as opposed to some of the dry facts found in textbooks? Don’t American students deserve the chance to look at events from multiple perspectives and discuss the different factors that led to an event, such as the signing of the Treaty of Versailles and the establishment of the League of Nations and the resultant outcomes of it?
I feel they do… but… such higher-order thinking skills are much more difficult to assess on a standardized exam, turned into a raw score, analyzed and compared, and thus are not convenient to be measured by the No Child Left Behind Act – just another example of this law’s shortcomings that outgoing President Bush continues to trumpet as his greatest success. The same as what is being done to historical facts is being done to American students – they are reduced to a number that can easily be counted and averaged – anything of true importance and the ability to relate to others is taken away and they are are forced to learn in a rather boring and disconnected manner. (I blogged about the benefits of Inquiry-based learning in a different post that is available here.) This policy will cause Americans to become increasingly isolated and fearful of the “outside world”.
I know of one such group, though they are most likely others, that has the goal of stopping this from happening. Americans for Informed Democracy conducts seminars and training programs for educational leaders to incorporate world events into their classroom to break down some of the barriers that keep Americans “at home”.
Please note that this review has received a few updates since it was originally posted on my previous blog on July 19, 2007.
Citation
Further Reading
- Americans for Informed Democracy: About Us
- Bush Calls for Resolve on NCLB Renewal on TeacherJay’s EduBlog
- How the World Learns About History: Lindaman and Ward on NPR’s Talk of the Nation
- Inquiry Based Learning on TeacherJay’s EduBlog
[...] Textbooks from Around the World Portray U.S. History can assist with that. You can read my review of History Lessons for a deeper discussion of how history is [...]