Molding the Good Citizen: The Politics of High-School History Texts. - book reviews

National Review, August 14, 1995 by Mark Gerson

Molding the Good Citizen: The Politics of High-School History Texts, by Robert Lerner, Althea K. Nagai, and Stanley Rothman (Praeger, 200 pp., $55)

Mr. Gerson graduated from Williams College in 1994. His book on his experience as a high-school teacher, In the Classroom, will be published next year by the Free Press. He is also the author of The Neoconservative Vision: From the Cold War to the Culture Wars, due from Madison Books this winter.

WHEN I started teaching sophomore U.S. history at an inner-city Catholic high school in Jersey City, I was allowed to choose between two textbooks to assign to the top class. The decision was mine, but I was encouraged by my department chairman and the principal to use the new set, bought just last year by a teacher who had then left. It was A People and a Nation: A History of the United States, by Mary Beth Norton and five colleagues. I opened the book randomly and saw a passage in bold type on birth control in the 1850s. "Significantly," the text proclaimed, "the birth-control methods women themselves controlled -- douching, the rhythm method, abstinence, and abortion -- were the ones that were increasing in popularity."

I knew I was inexperienced, but I could not figure out what such a passage was doing in a short book that purported to take high-school students through early American history. After reading the remainder of the book, I realized that this passage was no anomaly. Miss Norton devotes bold-face sections to "women's rights" (including a reference to "male tyranny against women"), "the role of women" (repeated for different time periods), "working women," and many similar topics. Moreover, she includes pictures of such seminal figures in American history as Judith Sargent ("the first notable American feminist theorist"), Mary Read and Anne Bonney (British pirates), and Rebecca Lukens (who took control of a steel company after her husband and her father died). In contrast, there is no picture of Jonathan Edwards, the extraordinary preacher and leader of the Great Awakening, who is perhaps the most important religious figure in American history. In Molding the Good Citizen: The Politics of High-School History Texts, Robert Lerner, Althea K. Nagai, and Stanley Rothman write of "filler feminism" in textbooks. Mary Beth Norton's book confirms the authors' observation that "knowing who Sybil Ludington was does not contribute to the development of a shared common culture."

Textbooks are often criticized for being cursory or incomplete, but the books I used (including A History of the United States, by Daniel Boorstin and Brooks Kelly, which Lerner et al. discuss) were informative, clear, and eminently readable. Although Molding the Good Citizen maintains that the Boorstin book has succumbed to multicultural influences in a few key areas, I didn't notice it. Boorstin covers all the important events in American history, without embracing the identity politics that has corrupted so much of education. Sure enough, Molding the Good Citizen reports that "consultants" have determined that "racism, anti-feminism, and elitism permeated the [Boorstin] work," which was also criticized for not saying nice things about hippies.

Molding the Good Citizen critiques several (but by no means all) widely used history textbooks from the 1940s through the 1990s. Usually the criticism is on target, but sometimes not. Through painstaking research and statistical analysis, the authors demonstrate that history textbooks have maintained a negative view of corporate capitalism and the "robber barons," while bowing to feminism and left-wing black politics by overstating the importance of such historical figures as Harriet Tubman and Crispus Attucks. Attucks, a black man who was supposedly the first to die in the American Revolution, was a minor figure who does not deserve much attention in a basic history textbook. Yet, while Lerner et al. are correct that Harriet Tubman saved "only" three hundred slaves and probably did less for the North than did Harriet Beecher Stowe (who, the authors critically report, is mentioned less frequently in history textbooks), the importance of Harriet Tubman cannot be overestimated. She was the greatest conductor on the Underground Railroad, which did more than anything else to free slaves before the Civil War, and serves as an excellent contrast to the failed attempts at massive revolt by Denmark Vescey, Nat Turner, and John Brown.

But that begs the question: Does it really matter whether Harriet Tubman or Harriet Beecher Stowe gets more space in textbooks? As long as we are speaking of figures of that magnitude, no. For what is the function of textbooks? It is an overstatement to say textbooks "mold the good citizen." Education may help do that, but textbooks are only one small part of education. They are used to supplement lectures or to provide some basic knowledge from which intelligent classroom discussion can begin. High-school students do not learn much from a textbook unless it is imaginatively reinforced by their classroom teacher. And teachers can emphasize whatever they want. One of my students, John, reported that his elementary-school teacher said that Oreo cookies are racist because they show the black crushing the white. If students are corrupted by identity politics, it is much more likely to be from that kind of comment than from what their textbook has to say.