Why Johnny's not anti-communist - criticism of teaching of history in American high schools

National Review, Feb 5, 1990 by Arch Puddington

But the texts do less well to explainining the overarching ideas that inspired twentieth-century political struggle, most notably Nazism and Communism. And they fail altogether in laying out the problems of the future. Those texts that have a gloomier perspective on mankind's fate ignore the struggle for liberty in favor of the threat of nueclear war, overpopulation, depletion of resources, energy shortages, pollution, and other environmental concerns. Even the more optimistic accounts stress the promise of scientific and technological progress over democracy's liberating potential.

It should come as no surprise that the textbooks which present traditional views of history do a far more satisfactory job than do those written from the perspective of global values. Two former White House officials, Chester E. Finn Jr. and Gary Bauer, examined six global-values texts. Their conclusions were disturbing, to put it mildly. One problem was a reluctance to state obvious facts which might be deemed controversial. Thus several texts made reference to the boat people of Southeast Asia without explaining that the reason for their flight was the brutal policies of the new Communist regimes of Vietnam and Cambodia. There was a similar reluctance to deal forthrightly with the Soviet invation of Afghanistan, which was explained as a response to Muslim extremists, or simply as a means of shoring up a tottering government in a neighboring country. The impression, Finn and Bauer note, was that "Moscow's move was essentially defensive or vaguely compassionate."

A constant theme of the global-values approach is the need for Americans to rid themselves of their ethnocentric mindset. In practice, this translates into a policy of ignoring, excusing, or in a few cases even praising the tyrannical practices of Third World dictators. Or, to be more accurate, certain approved dictators. Thus, whereas the evils of South Africa's apartheid system and the Chilean regime of General Pinochet are adequately described, Cuban totalitarianism is transformed into a model cooperative society.

Even more unsettling is the treatment of China. According to Andre Ryerson, whose evaluation of textbooks and study guides which deal with contemporary China was published in The American Educator, the most crucial events in the Communist period are routinely omitted, distorted, or formulated so as to make the most gruesome atrocities appear justified or even progressive.

The more controversial campaigns and experiments could not, of course, be completely tossed down the memory hole. To avoid presenting the regime in too negative a light, therefore, authors frequently resorted to explanations which paralleled the official Communist Party version of affairs. In describing the persecutions associated with land reform and Mao's campaigns against "counterrevolutionaries," for example, it was explained that the victims were limited to those who "resisted" official policies, or were unwilling to hand over their land, or simply "opposed the government," leaving the impression that those purged somehow got what they deserved. Never was it mentioned that the targets of these early campaigns were selected on the basis of their social class.