American History
Mark Steyn offers some typical conservative complaining:
Mark K, while I was down in Australia a while back, they had a big Education Summit going on, and the then Prime Minister, the great John Howard, used a marvelous phrase to me about how they wanted to teach Oz history — as an “heroic national narrative”. We don’t do that. In fact, we don’t teach it as any kind of coherent narrative at all. We’ve taken Cromwell’s advice to his portraitist to paint him “warts and all”, and show our kids all but solely the warts — spreading disease to Native Americans, enslaving blacks, interning the Japanese. Any non-wart stuff is mostly invented out of whole cloth: the US Constitution has its good points but they all come from the Iroquois, and the first Thanksgiving is some kind of proto-Communist celebration of collective farming.
A few months back, my little boy came home from Second Grade and said to me, “Guess what we learned today?” I said: “Rosa Parks.” He said: “How did you know that?” I said: “Because it’s always Rosa Parks.” And, if you don’t learn it in the context of any broader historical narrative, it’s just a story about municipal transit seating arrangements.
I’m fascinated by how common this depiction of American education is considering that it’s 100 percent false. No doubt there are bad history teachers and bad history classes in the United States, but anyone who’s vaguely in contact with reality can tell you that U.S. history is very much taught as a heroic national narrative. But since contemporary American conservatism is eye-deep in racism, Steyn can’t quite seem to grasp that teaching people about Rosa Parks and so forth is part of the heroic narrative of the victory of American ideals over the worst impulses of human nature. Similarly, the much-bemoaned-by-rightwingers greater attention given in recent decades to the contributions of women and ethnic minority groups is about trying to expand the circle of people who feel invested in the national narrative.
100 Responses to “American History”
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November 26th, 2008 at 11:22 am
It’s all a matter of degree. Most people would agree that Rosa Parks (used in a general sense) should be taught in schools, the disagreement is how much emphasis that sort of history gets as compared to the conventional stuff.
November 26th, 2008 at 11:29 am
the disagreement is how much emphasis that sort of history gets as compared to the conventional stuff.
Rosa Parks is the conventional stuff. What, you want more War of 1812. Certainly has it’s place. But let’s not pretend chest-thumping accounts of the Battle of New Orleans are what’s really relevant in US history.
November 26th, 2008 at 11:30 am
Steyn is a Canadian who dropped out of a Toronto high school and moved to London. He has no personal understanding of the US heroic narrative — the freedom-loving underdog fighting the forces of opression: the Redcoats, the Confederates, the Nazis, and Orval Faubus. Rosa Parks fits realy well into the American Narrative.
Canadian schools teach no narrative, which is why Steyn may be so clueless on this.
Micheal Ignatieff wrote a really great essay once about why history shouldn’t be a civics class. Heroic national narratives are good for Nazis and Americans, but they are not consistent with British-Canadian values. I agree.
November 26th, 2008 at 11:31 am
An heroic national narrative should be solely about heroic white people.
November 26th, 2008 at 11:32 am
As the parent of a fairly bright student who recently moved up from elementary to middle school, I think I can speak with some authority here: I don’t believe that conversation between Mark Steyn and his kid ever took place. Kids just don’t talk like that.
November 26th, 2008 at 11:37 am
Speaking as a parent of a high school kid, I’d say the schools in our Northern Virginia system get it about right. It’s a bit more flag-waving heroic narrative than warts and all, but I’m comfortable with them leaning a bit that way. Anyone who believes they’re getting a warts only picture is either getting bad information or wants hagiography instead of history.
Now Civics last year was tough. I did quite a bit of tongue biting when he was rattling off various rights I was afraid might belong in the history class rather than current events. Maybe some of that will turn around now. Maybe.
November 26th, 2008 at 11:38 am
I would never say that Steyn is correct about anything. But it is true that history in the US is generally taught in a piecemeal, fairly random fashion. People and events are plucked out of the air and shoved into a curriculum so that boxes can be checked. As Steyn says, many kids do in fact learn about Rosa Parks without being given any context of what slavery meant, the history of Southern segregation, American institutionalized racism, etc. In fact I’d think Steyn would be quite happy his kid is not being taught the full context behind Parks actions because none of that context supports the “historic narrative” he’s trying to push.
November 26th, 2008 at 11:38 am
But let’s not pretend chest-thumping accounts of the Battle of New Orleans are what’s really relevant in US history.
Sure they are! Let’s not forget that due to the slow communications of the day, the Battle of New Orleans was fought after the war of 1812 was concluded—thus establishing the great and noble American tradition of entirely useless military actions.
November 26th, 2008 at 11:39 am
As a college textbook editor, obliged to compare the competition ad nauseum, I can safely say that the Iroquois are not discussed in these books in context of the Constitution and are presented as, as one book puts it, a “warlike nation.” And the Montgomery boycott fully deserves its single page in a thousand-page text. Without it, one would have to eradicate coverage of the civil-rights movement, but I suppose that’s the right-wing ideal.
Anyhow, it’s hardly worth refuting claims from a reality-free community like the right as if we can somehow win by setting the record straight. The point is to strange strategy so that we can take back the narrative in the media, so that they truly are portrayed as reality-free extremists rather than part of a balanced dialogue between an oppressed group and the liberal media. Don’t fall into their trap.
November 26th, 2008 at 11:40 am
I wonder how the history of 9/11 and the Iraq war will be taught in the classrooms. Your average young person is not going to understand the logic of invading Iraq as a response to 9/11 and especially, when no WMDs were ever found. There is no way to spin these facts.
The Conservative movement has no interest in laying all the facts out and believe events can only be taught through their narrow world view or just not at all.
November 26th, 2008 at 11:40 am
Wouldn’t Rosa Parks be a prime example of our heroic national narrative?
November 26th, 2008 at 11:42 am
Fortunately we don’t have to worry about that for another 30 years or so.
When I was in school in the 1970s, history ended in 1940. We never talked about anything after that, I think because it was too recent memory and it would upset some parents.
November 26th, 2008 at 11:43 am
I wonder how the history of 9/11 and the Iraq war will be taught in the classrooms.
It might not be for a while. My mid-’70’s HS American history stopped in 1945 despite the fact the book wasn’t finished. Korea and the Cold War were apparently still too recent/hot to handle.
November 26th, 2008 at 11:44 am
Many conservative can’t stand the sense that they, white Americans, are being held accountable for the sins of White Americans. They don’t see this kind of history as inclusive, they see it as guilt inducing. It’s gotta make you wonder about the content of their character.
November 26th, 2008 at 11:45 am
Your average young person is not going to understand the logic of invading Iraq as a response to 9/11 and especially, when no WMDs were ever found.
When I was in high school in the early 1980s, we were taught that the cause of the Vietnam War was the Tonkin Gulf Incident, and we accepted it without questioning. I predict that future generations of schoolkids will have no trouble accepting Bush’s justifications for the Iraq War.
November 26th, 2008 at 11:48 am
You have to remember for a person like Steyn, Rosa Parks is another one of those historical warts. You let the spooks sit up front on the bus, and before you know it we have a black President.
November 26th, 2008 at 11:49 am
Tell me again, what’s the difference between conservatism and just being an asshole?
November 26th, 2008 at 11:50 am
As if the heroic Nationalist narratives taught in the glorious conservative past weren’t largely fictional. C’mon, Columbus “discovered” America? Shallow, heroic, idealized patriots against caricatured enemies? Manifest destiny?
History classes have been used to stroke the national ego at the expense of factual accuracy and completeness, which is apparently what conservatives would prefer since any attempts to correct this problem are derided as “revisionist”, as if that were a bad thing.
November 26th, 2008 at 11:50 am
zic,
I agree fully, why would you feel enraged at some minor blame cast upon dead people? Hmmm….you feel a strong affinity for the very beliefs and actions being described?
I am curious, was anyone here taught anything past the Korean war besides Rosa? I wasn’t in high school, and wonder if Matt Y made it to Vietnam – I sure did not.
Plus “Lies my Teacher told me” is the definitive text on high school history as a heroic narrative rather than real history. It is really a must read book.
November 26th, 2008 at 11:52 am
As Matt mentioned, the most shocking thing about this, though I suppose that by this point I shouldn’t be shocked at all, is that it’s simply not true. I’ve never seen any evidence, nor in my 1990s high school education, of schools pushing some kind of narrative that is decidedly un-heroic. The warts got some mention, but it was still pretty much a story about how awesome the U.S. was.
November 26th, 2008 at 11:56 am
I think Steyn is exactly wrong about this. Get into a discussion with a random person about various atrocities, injustices or general bad behavior on the part of a state or federal government. To this day you’ll be called daft for “alleging” American Indians were deliberately infected with smallpox. You’ll be told Negro slaves had it easy compared to the hell they left behind in Africa. African American men left to cope with untreated syphilis while white doctors watched their degeneration? Ha, couldn’t have happened! Lynchings, child labor, internments, land and resources thefts, union busting and dozens of other crimes are but myths to the general populace.
November 26th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
Teaching most history is hard, since it requires putting things in context, and kids for the most part have very little exposure to any relevant context. Simple narratives like the stripped down overly personalized/decontextualized accounts of Rosa Parks occur mostly for this reason.
You don’t learn history in school. It is 95% self-taught before grad school. The bigger issue here is the extent to which kids get access to newspapers and library books. Hey, MY’s blog is probably more important for fourth graders understanding history than what they learn in school.
My wife — who ended up in a history Ph.D. program — tells me she never realized history could be interesting before college — there was never any opportunity for controversy. Which is sad, since history is fully of really good entertaining fights. Sure beats sports lore in my opinion, even for ten year olds.
November 26th, 2008 at 12:13 pm
If you don’t teach the warts, the real triumphs in American history are diluted. One of the themes of American history is this countries struggle with itself, its many failures and it’s occasional triumphs like the Civil rights movement, the 19th Amendment, etc. That’s the truth that fools like Steyn do not grasp. Adversity and failure are the parents of great triumphs. We should bear our warts as proudly as our victories.
November 26th, 2008 at 12:14 pm
My daughter’s doing a report on William McKinley. William McKinley! Conservatives ought to be thrilled with schools.
November 26th, 2008 at 12:14 pm
I too believe that Steyn never had this conversation with his kid. Perhaps, we should train our disdained on writers who use made up events as evidence that they are right. As for the way US history is taught in middle schools, I think most stick to the “heroic narrative” stuff for the basic reason that its easy for kids to grasp. Most US history is so parred down in grade school because there is so much to cover, you don’t really have time for nuance or “the warts and all” stuff. American Revolution was fought by patriots in the face of tyranny (check), the Civil War was fought to free the slaves (check), WWII saved the world from the monster Hitler (check). What is a US history book supposed to offer? A counter arguments to MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech? And how is that speech not a part of our heroic narrative. You can’t get into too much detail considering that you have to cover the entirety of US history in a year, or sometimes a semester.
Perhaps, Mr. Steyn could stop inventing conversations with his kid and start looking at his kids textbook.
But that would make him honest now wouldn’t it . . . .
November 26th, 2008 at 12:17 pm
Matt, I was taught a history of America that painted it as literally the worst country in the world, ever, and that anything white people did was terrible and set civilization back hundreds of years. This was in Seattle, an extremely politically correct city, at a private catholic school (both gradeschool and highschool). It’s far, far worse in the public schools (which all my siblings went to). I used to whisper with a friend of mine why I thought America was a pretty decent country, and it wasn’t until my junior or senior year of HS that I felt comfortable openly saying that “I like my country.”
So don’t tell me that this is “100% false.”
November 26th, 2008 at 12:21 pm
I think we can draw a meaningful distinction between the sort of “history” that’s done in elementary school and the proper stuff from middle school onwards. The former was, at least in my experience, pretty close to what Sten Harriet Tubman than Abraham Lincoln. But actual yn describes – I’m not kidding when I say we spent more time ohistory classes, while they certainly have some flaws, are on the balance reasonably distributed. And of course, the question of content (Stephen Douglas or Frederick Douglass) and the question of attitude (teleogical/heroic vs. descripitive) are different questions entirely.
November 26th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
“Steyn is a Canadian who dropped out of a Toronto high school and moved to London.”
I’m starting to wonder if one of the problems with the conservative intelligensia is that it’s full of so many damn foreigners. It seems like there are a lot of right wing “thinkers” who come to America from other countries and these folks either seem to only understand the U.S. on a theoretical instead of a practical level or they’ve got that “USA #1″ missionary zeal of the converted.
Mike
November 26th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
I remember the take-away story from Rosa Parks was that any of us could be her, if we were brave enough. She was presented to us as exactly the kind of American hero kids should try and grow up to be.
I really can’t imagine a much more “heroic American narrative” than the one I was taught about Rosa Parks.
I find it flatly bizarre that Steyn can’t see her as an American hero.
November 26th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
er, fixing that…
I think we can draw a meaningful distinction between the sort of “history” that’s done in elementary school and the proper stuff from middle school onwards. The former was, at least in my experience, pretty close to what Steyn describes – I’m not kidding when I say we spent more time on Harriet Tubman than Abraham Lincoln. But actual history classes, while they certainly have some flaws, are on the balance reasonably distributed.
And of course, the question of content (Stephen Douglas or Frederick Douglass) and the question of attitude (teleogical/heroic vs. descripitive) are different questions entirely.
November 26th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
That “heroic national narrative” in OZ involved the usual rape of the enviornment and of the natives and the happy introduction of criminals from England. We did much the same.
As for an historical narrative here, see movies; John Wayne, Daniel Boone, etc.
November 26th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
teaching people about Rosa Parks and so forth is part of the heroic narrative
and part of Australia’s heroic narrative is that John Howard, who for 10 years refused to acknowledge the stolen generations of Aboriginal Australians, was voted out of office; replaced by a progressive PM with true moral vision.
November 26th, 2008 at 12:32 pm
Erik, I went to the public schools in Berkeley–which I imagine makes Seattle look like Mobile, AL–and we certainly learned a “warts and all” history, one that lapsed into unfairness towards America at times. However, I don’t believe for a second that you were taught that America “literally the worst country in the world, ever,” nor that “anything white people did was terrible and set civilization back hundreds of years.” I believe that you, Al in his comment above, and Steyn are unable to tell the difference between a frank discussion of history that includes “warts,” and a full-fledged demonization. That’s a kind of immaturity that one should really grow out of in the course of getting a high school diploma.
November 26th, 2008 at 12:33 pm
There is nothing new in the Steyn story. One gets its equivalent in Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind, with just about as little credibility. Bloom seems to have considered it beneath him to actually speak to his students to find out if his theories about them were actually true. So he claims that his students were turned into moral relativists by reading Beard’s Economic History of the United States. A claim that is undercut by the fact that Beard’s work is not morally relativist, and few of his students actually read it.
Instead what one gets is a lot of students who are taught history as a heroic historic narrative, and so come away with the belief that history is not about telling the truth.
But the Steyn claim about how history is taught goes back to when my generation was in school (which is more than half a generation before Yglesias was) and it was as much nonsense back then.
November 26th, 2008 at 12:41 pm
While I said it’s not worth arguing with wingnut paranoia, I’ll add in regard to the Al stereotype that actually, no, American independence is not presented as a mere necessary step to murdering others. Even the later removal of the Indian peoples isn’t presented as simply a tragedy, any more than the great Ford westerns presented it simply as a triumph over savages.
A text in front of me now, for example, has a couple of pages on the involvement of Indian peoples in the Revolution. It describes the Continental Congress as urging the Indians to keep out of what the Americans characterized as a “family quarrel,” and many Indian leaders as “reluctant to get involved.” It describes how the British gained support by arming the Indians and speaks of the “hard fighting” it took for American troops, including destruction of Indian town, but only in terms of charting the course of the Revolutionary War, not as a goal or horror in itself. It further notes how this divided the Indians themselves: “for the first time since the birth of their confederacy in the fifteenth century, the Iroquois were fighting each other.”
As for later issues, while a boxed feature has a heartfelt letter from a Cherokee tribe to Congress in 1836, even that suggests this is not a story of “us vs them” in the good old Cheney spirit. In fact, the section continues, Jackson’s policy of “Indian removal was a deeply divisive national issue,” and “northern opinion, led by Protestant missionaries and freform groups, was strongly opposed.”
In other words, it’s complex, and we know the right doesn’t do nuance. I’m quoting for no particular reason a book on the pile, Faragher et al. published by Pearson. And, incidentally, the chapter on the Revolution, if not upbeat enough for you, opens “A national community evolves at Valley Forge.” But hey, unpatriotic terrorists back then were already supporting Muslims like Obama.
November 26th, 2008 at 12:41 pm
Steyn was taught in Canada so it is obvious why he would feel this way. I too was taught in a Canadian public school. My elementary school was even french immersion! All I remember learning in history (social studies) was about First Nations’ culture, Egypt, atrocities, Japan, and some basic Canadian politics. This has all changed now; my brother who is in grade six learns almost all about Asia (less eurocentric if that is even possible).
It wasn’t until IB and my extended essay on Hiroshima that I realized most of what I was taught was useless. And it’s not that Steyn feels education should be taught from a more conservative perspective (as most comments above would suggest) but that elementary history should be taught differently. Take out the politics, take out most of the complexity, and teach kids how to think and write. Leave the fun stuff for college and maybe even high school.
November 26th, 2008 at 12:42 pm
My history classes were just not very good at teaching American history. Perhaps my school was just really bad, but it reads like a collection of SportsCenter highlights. Colonial times. Revolution. Civil War. Slavery. Great Depression. WWII.
Steyn’s right that we don’t get any context (but I don’t what he’s talking about with this heroic narrative horseshit)- there’s strikingly little done to illustrate the mood of the country or the political leanings of the country in various eras. You’ve got all these highlights but nothing to flesh out the whole picture.
And I don’t know, I guess our high schools aren’t suited for that sort of thing. But they should be.
November 26th, 2008 at 12:45 pm
Sorry I couldn’t let this stand.
Al, are you honestly comparing Mark Steyn to Alex de Tocqueville? Seriously? You might need look up the word “equivalency”?
Where to begin . . . . .
November 26th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
I actually don’t see the point in this. How exactly am I guilty for something done 100 years ago long before I was born? It’s worse than blaming Obama for something William Ayers did when he was 8 years old.
I’m not saying that Steyn is right, but I don’t agree with your attitude either.
This is another legacy of 60’s liberalism that I hope dies for it’s past it’s expiration date.
November 26th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
But I can tell the difference between someone who legitimately wants a debate and a simple-minded troll.
November 26th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
Want to know what bits of American history get taught on a regular basis to the equivalent of high schoolers in Britain? Wilson post-1918, isolationism, Wall Street Crash, New Deal, passing over WW2 to look at Civil Rights.
Want to know what bits of American history get taught on a very regular basis to high schoolers in the American South? The Civil War and Reconstruction. That’s about it. My wife’s class never made it to the First World War. So, as well as the heroic foundation narrative, you also get the perpetuation of a slightly weird Southern narrative, in which slavery can get finessed, and the damn Yankees lorded it over the South afterwards.
Al, of course, is smoking crack here.
November 26th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
I really doubt that.
That was not my experience in school, ever. And I had some really stupid teachers who taught us penguins lived on the north pole and such.
November 26th, 2008 at 12:53 pm
“And, God knows, no damned foreigner could ever come here and produce an insightful account of American society. Just would never happen. So, by all means, let’s dismiss Steyn because he’s Canadian.”
The difference between de Tocqueville and Steyn (besides the obvious things like brains and class) is that de Tocqueville came to America and THEN WENT BACK TO HIS OWN COUNTRY. He didn’t move to America and set himself up as critic-in-residence of all things Americana. De Tocqueville was consciously viewing the U.S. from the outside looking in. Conservative foreigners like Steyn swaddle themselves with particular American tropes and self-concepts as though they encompassed everything about the country, then get pissy when the reality of America doesn’t conform to their ideological fantasies.
Mike
November 26th, 2008 at 12:53 pm
So, by all means, let’s dismiss Steyn because he’s Canadian.
No, let’s dismiss him because he’s a hack whose career has mainly been spent serving as Conrad Black’s human bidet.
November 26th, 2008 at 12:53 pm
I don’t thing American History should be about either telling a heroic narrative or revealing the warts. Rather, it should aim at enabling students to think intelligently about their country and its past. That requires understanding both the things we can be proud of and the things we might not be proud of.
And as far as I can tell, schools are doing an ok job at that. As ok as they are doing with any other subject.
November 26th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
James (from 16),
Interesting. In the 90s, I was taught a much more nuanced view–that the war was the result of a misinterpretation of the containment strategy in general and the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in particular, and that the circumstances under which the Resolution was passed were highly suspect (mistaken reports of being fired upon by Vietnamese).
Perhaps with the passing of the Cold War and greater distance from Vietnam, more rational thinking prevailed. Hope it doesn’t take that long for a clear account of the invasion of Iraq, though. The Bush Administration has clearly been far more dishonest and inept than the Johnson Administration ever was, if it was at all (I tend to think its Vietnam policies were more the result of honestly mistaken assumptions, and in the Cold War, more excusable). Plus, where Johnson embraced the Civil Rights movement and passed Medicare to leave behind a decent domestic legacy, Bush’s foreign messes are matched only by his absolutely colossal domestic failures. I don’t think people were calling Johnson the worst president since Buchanan.
November 26th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
I was a history major, and since retiring I’ve read a lot of histories I missed in college. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not a narrative but an accumulation of episodes that may or may not coalesce into a trend.
Try this analogy: Pebbles roll down a hill. Sometimes their movement starts a landslide. Sometimes, they roll up against some barrier and accumulate until they overcome the blockage and start a more sudden and violent landslide. And sometimes, they just roll down the hill and randomly pelt passersby.
November 26th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
I don’t know what is worse, the fact that Steyn is a douchebag or the fact that he is breeding more douchebags.
November 26th, 2008 at 1:24 pm
Al, of course, is smoking crack here.
No he’s not. He’s delivering the Republican/Wingnut talking points he’s (presumably) paid to deliver. But it’s a fine line.
Also, Mark Steyn is a wingnut jackass and should never ever ever be taken seriously.
November 26th, 2008 at 1:28 pm
“Want to know what bits of American history get taught on a regular basis to the equivalent of high schoolers in Britain? Wilson post-1918, isolationism, Wall Street Crash, New Deal, passing over WW2 to look at Civil Rights.”
Only “high schoolers” who choose to do history beyond the required amount. The extent of my formal history education (at expensive private schools, no less) consisted of the Vikings, the Normans, a tiny bit of mediaeval history, Bede and the French revolution. Nothing else after the 14th century at all, no narrative (heroic or otherwise) and certainly no American history. I understand that’s changed now and history teaching in Britain basically means World War II and maybe the Industrial Revolution. Pretty much all the British history I’ve learned has been through researching the context of English literature, while my American history was entirely self- or parent-taught.
November 26th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
Greetings from the education front lines comrades. I am a middle school librarian who knows first hand that what Mr. Steyn writes is bunk. Yes the American History curiculum is full of our story “warts and all”. That is the point, its a full history not just warts as the Canadian seems to think.
BTW if you talk to someone from Ireland, Cromwell’s warts were not his worst attribute.
November 26th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
shorter gordon gekko:
I was every bit as delusional in high school as I am today.
November 26th, 2008 at 2:13 pm
By all means, teach the war of 1812!
Curriculum:
- overconfidence prior to the declaration of war, expectation of easy victory (Thomas Jefferson: conquering Canada will be “a mere matter of marching”)
- initial invasion of Canada gets stalled right at the border
- Fort Detroit: numerically superior American troops surrender to British-Shawnee troops, apparently out of racist fear that the injuns would scalp them
- Washington DC was raided, and the White House was set on fire
- New Orleans, the most significant American victory, was won after the war was over
Conclusion: arrogant hawks start a war they can’t finish, leading to disaster. Americans need to learn that history, lest they continue repeating it.
November 26th, 2008 at 2:40 pm
Personally, I think that any American history course should base itself in the initial contradiction that the person who wrote the Declaration of Independence also owned slaves. The disconnect between the lofty ideals and our failure to live up to them in various ways throughout the centuries makes for a pretty compelling narative. Plus, I worry that without that balance then it’s too easy to lower the standards that we should hold ourselves too. You start with “USA #1!”, then start talking crazy about how Japanese internment was a great idea, condone torture, and finally end up in crazy denial land similar to Japan’s view of WWII or Turkey and the Armenians. Might be too late actually.
November 26th, 2008 at 2:41 pm
Al, your phrase “the basic heroic truth of American history” says it all, because while I am a big fan of the American ideal and the times we’ve lived up to it, I know that there are many cases in which America, like any other nation, has behaved in an unheroic fashion. What’s the basic heroic truth about enshrining slavery in the Constitution? History that neglects that isn’t real history, even at an 8th-grade level.
November 26th, 2008 at 2:42 pm
Whomever suggested “Lies My Teacher Told Me” is spot-on. Great book.
I went to a run-of-the-mill public school and I think my teachers/textbooks focused way more on the “straightforward” material like the Dec of Ind., Constitution, WWII, etc. than on something like the Civil Rights Movement. Steyn is a jackass.
Perhaps the biggest travesty, though, is the obsession with teaching European History at the expense of every other part of the world. I honestly probably know 10 times more about medieval Europe than I do about Chinese or Indian history.
Colonialism of the mind and all that….
November 26th, 2008 at 3:01 pm
Quite right.
Mr. Steyn apparently believes that Rosa Parks
didn’t know her place. This is common on the right.
Everything and everyone has a place and how dare
anyone upset the apple cart.
November 26th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
Note that Steyn is Canadian. His complaint about Rosa Parks being a “wart” is valid in that any heroic moments in US history make our northern neighbors look dull and uninspiring in contrast.
November 26th, 2008 at 3:14 pm
#50. pseudonymous in nc Says:
So, by all means, let’s dismiss Steyn because he’s Canadian.
No, let’s dismiss him because he’s a hack whose career has mainly been spent serving as Conrad Black’s human bidet.
pseudonymous in nc wins the thread! Hilarious!
November 26th, 2008 at 3:25 pm
Hmm,
Steyn sure says “we” a lot in this piece, doesn’t he? Which is odd, seeing as how he’s still a Canadian Citizen. (at least according to his wiki page)
His characterization of American History just doesn’t make sense. Even if he was conflating his Canadian learning with what he assumes the Yanks are taught, ’cause Canadian history isn’t taught like that either. (unless of course he went to French Immersion like I did – which seemed to teach history from a “Quebec et le Monde” perspective – anything that happened anywhere in the world since 1600 is only interesting insofar as it affected (generally adversely) the mighty and humble Quebecois…man I miss high school history sometimes…that stuff was golden!)
(Speaking as a Canadian myself, I’m more than happy lend our Conservative Hacks like Steyn and Frum to our southern friends and neighbours…hopefully you guys’ll ignore them as fully as we learned to
November 26th, 2008 at 4:52 pm
This whole ‘Canadian’ debate is silly. It’s his focus on John Howard that’s really outrageous.
John Howard wanted a ‘heroic national narrative’ because our CURRENT schooling mentions Aboriginal dispossession and the forced seizure of Aboriginal children for generations. John Howard’s idea of ‘values in schools’ was a picture of Simpson on his Donkey, our WW1 talisman, with a bunch of generic Hallmark slogans plastered onto the poster (mateship! pride! tradition!) John Howard spent the first two years of his PMship appeasing racists with this kinda dogwhistle ‘reforming history’ stuff not because he has a genuine interest in scholarship, but because acknowledgement of Aboriginal dispossession is counterproductive to preventing native title claims on pastoral land.
John Howard’s ‘history’ fell somewhere between an afterschool special and David Irving. That’s just my opinion, of course; Steyn’s allowed to support that, because that’s what he believes, too. But we have much greater grounds for criticism than where Steyn was born.
November 26th, 2008 at 7:02 pm
Matt,
You don’t have a clue what’s taught in American public schools these days.
Here’s the list chosen by 2000 juniors and seniors of most famous people in American history, no Presidents allowed:
1. Martin Luther King Jr.: 67%
2. Rosa Parks: 60%
3. Harriet Tubman: 44%
4. Susan B. Anthony: 34%
5.Benjamin Franklin: 29%
6. Amelia Earhart: 25%
7. Oprah Winfrey: 22%
8. Marilyn Monroe: 19%
9. Thomas Edison: 18%
10. Albert Einstein: 16%
All I have to say is that Sojourner Truth must be feeling pretty ripped off not to make the list.
Seriously, the absence of Jackie Robinson on this list shows how feminized schools have gotten, which explains a lot about the much higher dropout rate among boys.
About 20 years ago, E.D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy survey revealed that more high school students could identify Harriet Tubman than Stalin or Churchill. I recall William F. Buckley wondering who in the world Harriet Tubman could be. If she was more important than Stalin, how could he have gone his whole life without ever hearing of her? And if she wasn’t important, why was she famous?
How naive we all were back then!
I first heard about Harriet Tubman in my elementary school reader around 1969 or 1970. I was fascinated by the concept of her Underground Railroad and couldn’t wait for the part where the slaves tunnel their way from the South to Canada, although, as I recall, the story turned out to be disappointingly lacking in detail about how they built the locomotives and laid the track.
In contrast, here’s The Atlantic Monthly’s recent list of “100 Most Influential Americans,” as chosen by ten top historians. The top Americans who weren’t Presidents on The Atlantic’s list were:
5 Alexander Hamilton
6 Benjamin Franklin
7 John Marshall
8 Martin Luther King Jr.
9 Thomas Edison
11 John D. Rockefeller
14 Henry Ford
16 Mark Twain
19 Thomas Paine
20 Andrew Carnegie
So, three overlaps (Ben, MLK, and Thomas Alva) in the top 10 but only 2 more (Einstein and Susan B. Dollar) of the students’ list showed up anywhere on The Atlantic’s top 100.
November 26th, 2008 at 8:44 pm
What Sailer conveniently leaves out of his explanation of that study is that the the high schoolers were asked to compile two top-ten lists: (a) famous Americans, and (b) famous American women. The two lists were then blended to produce the top ten people appearing most often on either list. This methodology obviously skewed the final list to include a lot more women.
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/rawfisher/2008/06/name_the_most_famous_americans.html
November 26th, 2008 at 8:50 pm
By the way, Sailer, were you being intentionally dishonest, or did you just not understand how that list was compiled?
November 26th, 2008 at 9:56 pm
The only thing Mark Steyn has accomplished lately is
his accidentaly assistance to prosecutors during
the Conrad Black trial.
Steyn is wrong about everything – John Howard is a chump
and none of that history he tells is taught. He is obviosly
lying about his kid’s class too. Is that conservative? Steyn using his kid to tell a lie about American history classes?
November 26th, 2008 at 10:01 pm
Since Steyn obviously lied and made up a conversation
with his kid, it’s worth noting how he would feel
if Clinton did the same thing.
November 26th, 2008 at 10:04 pm
Steyn seems to have a track record of inventing things to prove whatever point he wants to make – Look at his
pre election posts when he made up all sorts
of Obama fundraising violations. He just
invented things, it seems.
November 26th, 2008 at 11:15 pm
Sailer is right: other than Presidents the students didn’t name a lot of white men. Wonder if any of those guys might have skewed the final demographics back toward Sailer’s own.
And, of course, Sailer runs into exactly the problem that Steyn does: not recognizing that these non-white-male Americans can be part of a heroic national narrative.
November 27th, 2008 at 5:43 am
Lists are boring nonsense Sailer. That is exactly what is wrong with American history. Or any history for that matter. In any American K-12, history is so diluted by being taught at such a high level, that in many cases facts actually present history that is misleading and even wrong. History is not a bunch of facts. History is analysis and understanding. You can not teach the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution without a deep discuss of that peculiar institution. Its impact was felt everywhere and because of the need to be united with the south, the northern colonies were willing to not wrestle with what was plain before their eyes. What is amazing in this story is how many great Americans’ views changed. Washington went from slave holder believing that blacks should not be in the Continental Army to one who freed his slaves because he knew it was wrong. Once again this great man gave this country another great precedent that was ignored by the south and many in the north until 1861.
November 27th, 2008 at 5:43 am
Oh, they don’t teach Rosa Parks in 2nd grade where we live at Matt.
November 27th, 2008 at 9:25 am
“spreading disease to native americans”
* nope, we didn’t really learn about that in my backwoods public school … but we were told how dashing and bootstrappy Andrew Jackson was … trail of tears — only that it happened
“enslaving blacks”
* my history teacher never talked about black slavery. we talked about the civil war and how it was a dispute over states rights
“interning the japanese”
* what are you talking about? all i know about the japanese is that they bombed pearl harbor
“the first Thanksgiving is some kind of proto-Communist celebration of collective farming”
* i was not told that but it kind of makes sense now that you brought it up … i always just thought the indians simply saved the pilgrims out of pity because they didn’t know how to provide for themselves
“rosa parks”
* just like the writer claims, my red state school taught me that rosa parks happened and that it was part of a larger movement … one that ended in riots or some such crazy narrative
Don’t act like conservative teachers aren’t out there warping our children’s minds to conform to their paranoid, apocalypse fantasies. My high school history teacher wanted me to believe that the white man exploded onto this country as a pure act of self-reliance and took what he needed from a savage people who didn’t deserve it, with the “help” of a people who were better off here than back in Africa “where everyone is starving” and that WWII (warts and nuclear bombs and all) was the best thing that ever happened to planet Earth. That was in the 1990’s. I can only imagine how his lecture incorporated 9/11. I suppose the Winthorpian God’s Plan line has been pasted on the middle east and that Barack Obama symbolizes the end times. Hooray, the escalator of light!
November 27th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
Call me crazy, but I teach BOTH the Battle of New Orleans (which was not at all a completely worthless battle) and Rosa Parks. How about that?
November 27th, 2008 at 1:08 pm
“Its impact was felt everywhere and because of the need to be united with the south, the northern colonies were willing to not wrestle with what was plain before their eyes.”
I want to put in a word for Charles Beard (a dead white guy). Upon reading Beard it became clear to me that northern banking interests and southern plantation masters both sought to unite against small farmers and laborers, free and unfree–until the southern “agrarian” interests decided that paying interest on the national debt to northern banking interests would probably run them into the ground. At that point, you have the spectacle of the southern based “Republican Party” making nice with free labor in the north, in attempt to defeat the (Federalist) bankers. It’s a short hop from there to “at least you’re not an N*.”
This seems to unlock some of the mysteries of contemporary political dynamics. I think it’s peculiar that Beard has been ushered out of the university curriculum by liberals and conservatives alike.
Evidently, “class interests” are the last thing we will ever be able to permitted to discuss. So, to my mind saying that “northerners wouldn’t acknowledge what was right before their eyes” is a little inaccurate. They colluded in slavery because it was part and parcel in they set out to do.
November 27th, 2008 at 3:07 pm
George Washington was a hero. Rosa Parks was uppity.
November 28th, 2008 at 2:13 pm
American history can be taught as a heroic narrative, the problem is folks like Steyn can’t get their heads around the fact that the heroes might not be dead white men.
Obama gets this completely, as you would expect, and is slowly teaching us to understand that the bravery and moral clarity of a Rosa Parks is as heroic as anything else the history books have to teach.
http://obamalondon.blogspot.com/
November 28th, 2008 at 5:03 pm
cm Says:
November 26th, 2008 at 11:49 am
Tell me again, what’s the difference between conservatism and just being an asshole?
That’s a trick question, right? “Al” is exhibit A….
November 29th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
As a high school history teacher on these front lines, here is what I teach. Geography as determinant, ie. see Guns, Germs, and Steel, Native Americans not ideal primitives nor bloodthirsty savages. The die off from disease inevitable after contact.
Prior European contacts, ie. Vikings
Background to exploration, spices etc, slavery in sugar plantations prior to Columbus.
Columbus and conquistadores affects of Reconquista
English Wars of Roses, Religious conflicts,
Jamestown as early corporation, saved by tobacco, beginnings of American democracy and slavery
Plymouth as religious cult but 50 years of peace with Wampanoags, Separation and freedom for themselves.
Get the idea. I try to teach a bit of nuance. These high school students do nuance very well, thank you.
November 29th, 2008 at 11:18 pm
Erik (way back up at #30),
I was taught in Seattle Public Schools (K-12, 1971-1983) and the way I was taught American History didn’t include any warts. The Minuteman weren’t compared to guerillas or terrorists. Slavery was because the South needed the cheap labor. There was little, if any, stories about the smallpox that the whites gave to the natives. Manifest Destiny helped the overcrowding in the eastern part of the United States. Not one of my teachers wondered why the Japanese were sent to internment camps, but not also the Germans and Italians.
And I know a lot of younger folks and none of them have ever told me anything like the experiences you and your siblings had.
November 30th, 2008 at 6:43 am
As an Australian, I find laughable any insinuation that my country offers more of a “great historical narrative” in the teaching of its history than does the United States. The defining “problem” for a century of Australian historians was how to forge a national identity in the absence of greatness. They were long preoccupied with “cultural cringe,” the idea that Australians felt too little national pride, in large part because of the unglorious means by which the nation had come into being: first as a penal colony for petty thieves and prostitutes, later as an accidental federation whose moment of creation was decided not by us but for us by our departing colonial masters. There was no glorious, bloody war of indepencence, no beloved “founding fathers” of intellect. I learned far more British history at school than I did Australian history – it just wasn’t deemed interesting enough. Does this sound like a U.S. history textbook?
And we STILL have the British Queen as head of state – in no small part due to the Machiavellian maneuvers of a certain Prime Minister, which frustrated a popular movement to create an Australian Republic in 1999. Thankfully, we now are rid of that monarchist, anglophilic Prime Minister – the “great John Howard.” His successor Kevin Rudd, in tackling front-on the shameful past of Australia’s mistreatment of its Aboriginal inhabitants, knows that his country’s history will be irrelevant to its multicultural, non-British present unless ALL of it is painted – yes, including its warts.
December 1st, 2008 at 12:59 am
The problem, as I see it, is that history has a well known liberal bias.
December 3rd, 2008 at 6:23 am
Bellevue Community College hosted its sixth-annual American Indian Film Festival (AIFF) Nov. 5-7, featuring the works of 20 Indigenous directors. The event is equal parts art, empathy, and inspiration as it features movies that range in
December 15th, 2008 at 8:38 pm
Our Thanksgiving holiday can trace its origin to a three-day celebration in 1621, probably in October, that the colonists shared with Wampanoag Indians. Native Americans celebrated harvests for centuries before the Europeans
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