Molding the Good Citizen. - book review

Public Interest, Summer, 1996 by Morton Keller

During the past year or so the kulturkampf between political correctness and more traditional values has shifted from literary studies to American history. Flare-ups have occurred over Smithsonian exhibits dealing with the American West and with the dropping of the atomic bomb and, most notably, over last year's National Standards for United States History.

It is no great mystery why this should be so. A nation's history is a natural battlefield for the clash of deeply held cultural values and beliefs. The furor over the character and meaning of the American past started with the cultural fissure that opened up during the 1960s, and it has been deepened by the mounting social and economic anxieties of the past quarter of a century. Those inclined to look benignly on the national character seek in its history confirmation of their beliefs; so too do those who have a darker view of the American experience.

Which of these clashing perceptions colors the high-school history texts from which (it is assumed) American adolescents derive their sense of the American past? Both Molding the Good Citizen(*) and Lies My Teacher Told Me(**) take on that question. Their answers differ only in degree: 180 of them.

Molding the Good Citizen, by Robert Lerner, Althea K. Nagai, and Stanley Rothman, all affiliated with the Center for the Study of Social and Political Change at Smith College, dissects 15 high-school American history textbooks, three each from the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The authors subjected these texts to both qualitative and quantitative analysis, using a coding scheme designed to extract the content of the textbooks' character: that is, who and what they talk about and their attitudes - positive, neutral, or negative - toward their subjects. Their conclusion was that the texts, regardless of decade, reflect a "liberal-Progressive" view of American history, one that has dominated American education since the 1930s. The emphases of this perspective have changed over the decades: from Popular Front economic collectivism in the 1930s and 1940s to the class-race-gender triad that has dominated since the 1960s. But there has been an underlying consistency of orientation.

The authors' method has the strengths, and the weaknesses, of straightforward content analysis: It yields substantial qualitative evidence, which is, though, not very well attuned to ambiguities and nuances of tone. Their conclusions at times are all too obvious: "We find that American history textbook authors transformed the texts from scarcely mentioning blacks in the 1940s to containing a substantial multicultural (and feminist) component in the 1980s."

But - and this is revealing - much of this increase consisted of what the authors call "filler feminism" - more pictures, more words, but not necessarily more descriptions of the things that notable women did. The same can be said for the treatment of Indians and blacks. "History by quota," in which sheer presence and portrayal - particularly in terms of the injustices that these groups suffered - has primacy over their significance as players in the drama of American life.

The authors uncover other tidbits of political correctness. Columbus was notably transformed from a good to a bad fellow. At the same time, Indians evolved not only into Native Americans but from "naked savages in their miserable huts" to peaceful Arcadians, democratic and collective, at one with nature.

The authors find that there has been little change in the treatment of American business and businessmen since the 1930s, now as then denigrated and downplayed. Presidents continue to have a prominent place in history texts, but positive and neutral references declined from 61 percent of the total in the 1940s to 29 percent in the 1980s. George Washington and Andrew Jackson in particular have come under a cloud, the former in part because of his slaveholding, the latter wholly because of his negative attitude toward Indians.

Such, in brief, is the triumph (the authors would say the treason) of the progressive educators, which is reflected, they note en passant, in the National History Standards. Glumly they tote up the cost of this long-term development: a decline in the shared knowledge, and sense of the relative importance and unimportance of past events, that in their view is necessary if high-school history teaching is to foster a meaningful sense of civil identity in the students who are exposed to it.

Lies My Teacher Told Me, by James Loewen, couldn't have a more different take. It examines a dozen textbooks, published between 1974 and 1991. Only one, Todd and Curti's Triumph of the American Nation (and even so, a later edition), was also on Molding the Good Citizen's list. Still, the texts may be presumed to be more similar than dissimilar. That the two studies nevertheless come up with such different readings suggests how deep is the cultural gulf between the nation's conservative and countercultural views.

Loewen, a professor of sociology at the University of Vermont, starts from the premise that high-school texts are the source of the widespread distaste for history among high-school students. Why? Because they are dull, overlong, and, most of all, irrelevant and biased - or, as he prefers to put it, full of "lies." He, like his competitors, is convinced that his texts reflect an agenda - but one very different from Lerner and his colleagues' "liberal-Progressivism." Unadventurous publishers, standpat school boards, local pressure groups, and overworked and uninformed teachers have conspired to produce texts that bore students into passive acceptance of the status quo. They have done this by a judicious mix of stultifying prose, anodyne formulations, and most of all, a feel-good view of the American past which endlessly repeats bromides and suppresses the darker truths of our national history.