Politics and Teaching History: Brainwashing Students

 James W. Loewen is a sociology professor who has spent a lot of time reviewing and comparing the various history textbooks that our high school students are required to read.  He first reported his findings in 1995 in his book Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong.  His work created a stir and he felt compelled to return in 2007 with a look at a new set of textbooks.  He returned again in 2018 with a version that acknowledges the Trump era in a new Preface, but otherwise the book was unchanged.  The first thing one should take away from a reading today is that we know little about our nation’s history because we are not taught anything that might be controversial or might generate disappointment in our country.  The second illumination results from recognizing that the way history is taught to our children is similar to the approach autocrats have always used to create a compliant society.

Loewen was moved to make this startling claim.

“People who have taken more mathematics courses are more proficient at math than those who have not.  The same holds true for English, foreign languages, and almost every other subject.  Only in history is stupidity the result of more, not less schooling.”

In Loewen’s experience authors whose names appear on the cover of the books seem to make mistakes that they couldn’t possibly have made if they had actually written the book.  And, they seem to have little knowledge of what is actually in their book.

“Editors tell me that recent chapters of American history textbooks are ‘typically written by freelance writers.  Nor is it just the final chapters.  Judith Conaway, who has ghostwritten elementary-level textbooks in several fields, wrote, ‘It is absolutely the standard practice in the textbook publishing industry to assign ALL the writing to freelancers.  Then you rent a name to go on the cover.”

If historians are not writing our textbooks, who is?  The publishers of course.  Their goal is not to produce good history, but to sell a product to as many school systems as possible.  Texas, with its high population and conservative bent, can veto any section of a textbook its reviewers are unhappy with.  The wise publisher knows what will pass review and what will not.  Politicians and the general public were taught that they had historical heroes and they do not want their heroes to be sullied by historical fact.  They were taught that white men with European heritage created the modern world, and they are happy with that.  They were taught that their country is the greatest country in the world (in all ways) and has been the “good guy” in all disputes, and that belief must not be disturbed.  They were taught that everyone can be a success if they just work hard, and that progress is inevitable, providing a better life for all.  It would be wise not to cast doubt on that outrageous belief, although it implies that if you do not succeed it is your own fault.

“Textbook authors need not concern themselves unduly with what happened in history, since publishers use patriotism, rather than scholarship, to sell their books.  This emphasis should hardly be surprising: the requirement to take American history originated as part of a nationalist flag-waving campaign early in this century [twentieth].  Publishers start the pitch on their outside covers, where nationalist titles such as The Challenge of Freedom and Land of Promise are paired with traditional patriotic icons: eagles, Independence Hall, the Stars and Stripes, and the Statue of Liberty.  Four of the six new books in my sample display the American flag on their covers; the others use red, white, and blue for their titles and authors.  Publishers market the books as tools for helping students to ‘discover’ our ‘common beliefs’ and ‘appreciate our heritage.’  No publisher tries to sell a textbook with the claim that it is more accurate than its competitors.”

Loewen utilizes the majority of the chapters to illustrate how far from actuality is the history presented to our students.  He begins with the destruction of many of the myths developed to celebrate our early history, with the altered history of our dealings with Native Americans and African Americans being the most troubling.  He points out that the history of slavery and racism changes as what society wants to hear changes.  After the end of Reconstruction, the Southern narrative was sold nationwide and blacks were deemed incapable of participating in governing, or even in tending to their own affairs.  With the success of the Civil Rights Movement, history would have to be rewritten.  Blacks would be characterized more appropriately, but under no circumstances must whites be blamed for anything.

“Although textbook authors no longer sugarcoat how slavery affected African Americans, they minimize white complicity in it.  They present slavery virtually as uncaused, a tragedy; rather than a wrong perpetrated by some people on others.”

“The emotion generated by textbook descriptions of slavery is sadness, not anger.  For there’s no one to be angry at.  Somehow we ended up with four million slaves in America but no owners.  This is part of a pattern in our textbooks: anything bad in American history happened anonymously.  Anyone named in our history made a positive contribution…Or as Frances Fitzgerald put it when she analyzed textbooks in 1979, ‘In all history, there is no known case of anyone’s creating a problem for anyone else’.”

“When textbooks make racism invisible in American history, they obstruct our already poor ability to see it in the present.  The closest they come to analysis is to present a vague feeling of optimism: in race relations, as in everything, our society is constantly getting better.  We used to have slavery; now we don’t.  We used to have lynchings; now we don’t.  Baseball used to be all white; now it isn’t.  The notion of progress suffuses textbook treatments of black-white relations, implying that race relations have somehow steadily improved on their own.  This cheery optimism only compounds the problem, because whites can infer that racism is over.  ‘The U.S. has done more than any other nation in history to provide equal rights for all.,’ The American Tradition assures us.  Of course, its authors have not seriously considered the levels of human rights in the Netherlands, Lesotho, or Canada today, or in Choctaw society in 1800, because they don’t mean their declaration as a serious treatment of comparative history—it is just ethnocentric cheerleading.”

An important aspect of education in the K-12 years is referred to as socialization.  Students learn the rules of society and how to interact with others: what is acceptable and what is not.

“Teachers may try to convince themselves that education’s main function is to promote inquiry, not iconography, but in fact the socialization function of schooling remains dominant at least through high school and hardly disappears in college.  Education as socialization tells people what to think and how to act and requires them to conform.  Education as socialization influences students simply to accept the rightness of our society.  American history textbooks overtly tell us to be proud of America.”

Loewen uses Fidel Castro and Mao Tse-tung as examples of autocratic leaders who used education to create their versions of good citizens: people who would behave themselves and conform to the wishes of their leaders.  The more education, the more conformity.  If he had written today, his best example would have been the Chinese who have added high tech surveillance to education to make conformity even more rigid.

History textbooks are not for learning history, they are designed to indoctrinate children with belief systems that are consistent with those of society in general: our nation is the greatest, we always do the right thing, if we stay the course things will get better for everyone  Once such a system is initiated, it is easy to propagate it forward in time as each generation provides the role model for the one following.  The best one can say of such an approach is that it will protect the status quo.  The worst one can say is that it forms the basis for creating a fascist state under the wrong leadership.

The Presidency and the Productivity of Old People

 There is much discussion about the age of Joe Biden, 80, and much less about the age of his rival Donald Trump, 77.  This disparity suggests that the claims being made have little to do with reality and a lot to do with politics and what allows media to make money from promoting the issue.  I have a personal stake in the discussions.  Being about to turn 80 myself, whether or not an 80-year-old is competent to be the president is a subject of great interest.  This topic of aging and competence has been studied for at least a century, but none of these studies have been deemed relevant to the media chatter taking place.

I first became interested in the issue of aging and productivity when I encountered an article in The Atlantic by Ezekiel J. Emanuel: Why I Hope to Die at 75.  Since at the time I was only a few years from that age and felt that I was enjoying life at the time, perhaps more than I ever had previously, I found his sentiment bizarre.  Emanuel was not planning or hoping to die at that age, but he planned, and at the age of 65, still planned to forego any medical treatments that might assist in prolonging his life.  He believed that life beyond that age is not worth living if it followed the normal trajectory.  What he considered the normal trajectory is a concise summary of what people assume of the 80-year-old Biden.

“Even if we aren’t demented, our mental functioning deteriorates as we grow older. Age-associated declines in mental-processing speed, working and long-term memory, and problem-solving are well established. Conversely, distractibility increases. We cannot focus and stay with a project as well as we could when we were young. As we move slower with age, we also think slower.”

These are aging issues that beset most people and they are not controversial.  However, he then proceeds to make the following claim.

“.the fact is that by 75, creativity, originality, and productivity are pretty much gone for the vast, vast majority of us.”

This claim is highly misleading.  Emanuel used a chart showing a drop off in creativity and productivity with age provided by Dean Keith Simonton, a psychology professor at the University of California at Davis, to support this claim.  An article by Simonton provides an entirely different interpretation of that chart.  In fact, it suggests that if Emanuel kept his health and his enthusiasm for his work, he should expect to have a productive life as long as he so wishes.  Simonton’s conclusions have direct relevance to how we should evaluate old people in general and aging politicians in particular.

 

Simonton tells us that the chart represents most accurately a career progression rather than a chronological age progression.  Since most people have a single career beginning early in life, the two get conflated.  People who begin a career later in life will likely experience the same shape productivity curve, just shifted later in chronological age.  This suggests that the drop in productivity is due to things other than age.  Some people will simply tire of whatever area they have been working in and look for a more satisfying activity, perhaps embarking on another career timeline.  An academic, like Emanuel, will typically need a burst of productivity to even initiate his career.  Once established and tenure is attained, a professor might choose to focus on more difficult studies hoping to provide more important but fewer contributions.  Often academics will turn their interests to teaching or writing of books, both of which could be viewed as a decrease in productivity.  But the most important reveal by Simonton is that if a productive academic wishes to remain productive for the rest of his/her life, it should be possible.

“Especially noteworthy is the realization that the expected age decrement in creativity in some disciplines is so minuscule that we can hardly talk of a decline at all.  Although in certain creative activities, such as pure mathematics and lyric poetry, the peak may appear relatively early in life, sometimes even in the late 20s and early 30s, with a rapid drop afterwards, in other activities, such as geology and scholarship, the age optimum may occur appreciably later, in the 50s even, with a gentle, even undetectable decrease in productivity later.”

Simonton also introduces the concept of the “quality ratio,” a way of indicating that those farther along in their careers tend to produce fewer works, but the works are often of higher quality.

“This probabilistic connection between quantity and quality, which has been styled the ‘constant probability of success’ principle...strongly implies that an individual’s creative powers remain intact throughout the life span.”

There is also a noticeable tendency for a burst of productivity to occur near end of life, something Simonton refers to as the “swan-song phenomenon.”

“After subjecting 1,919 works by 172 classical composers to detailed quantitative scrutiny, one striking pattern emerged: As the composers neared their final years, when death was becoming more than an abstract contingency, they began to create compositions that were more concise, with simpler and more restrained melodic lines; yet these compositions scored extremely well in esthetic significance, as judged by musicologists, and eventually joined the popular mainstays of the classical repertoire.  It is as if each composer, when seeing the end approaching fast on life’s horizon, put utmost into everything undertaken, with the knowledge that within the current works-in-progress dwelt a last artistic testament.  Whatever the motivation, the mere fact that dying creators can pull off such feats provides another argument on behalf of the theory that the general decline in output need not be synonymous with a deterioration in creative powers.”

Hopefully this discussion clears up misunderstandings about age and competence.  When it comes to the presidency, the president is not provided much time to be creative and productive.  The president is surrounded by hordes of young creative and productive people who throw so much stuff at him/her that there is barely time to consider all the proposals.  What is needed in this case is wisdom—the wisdom to choose the best alternatives presented.  Vote for wise and experienced people.

So, if one believes Biden or Trump is currently capable of being president, there is no reason to assume another four or five years of ageing will render either of them incompetent.

 

Planet Preservation: Actions Must Be Taken: Toilets

 As this article is being written, we are nearing the end of the summer of 2023, a season noted by near weekly weather disasters.  Very little is now heard about “the climate hoax.”  More people are beginning to believe some sort of response, some sort of change in lifestyle will be necessary.  The consumption of fossil fuels is producing greenhouse gases that are raising the global temperature and that must be limited if an apocalyptic future is to be avoided.  However, other human activities, less well known, are also endangering our future. 

It could be startling to some to encounter an article by Chelsae Wald titled How Recycling Urine Could Help Save the World (Nature, Vol 602, 10 February 2022, 202-206).  Wald’s version of saving the world recognizes that human urine is loaded with potassium, nitrogen, and phosphorous, the critical elements used to produce fertilizer for our crops.  By using toilets capable of separating and collecting urine, the product could be converted to a form that could be used directly as fertilizer. 

“According to Simha’s estimates, humans produce enough urine to replace about one-quarter of current nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers worldwide; it also contains potassium and many micronutrients. On top of that, not flushing urine down the drain could save vast amounts of water and reduce some of the strain on ageing and overloaded sewer systems.”

“They projected that communities with urine diversion could lower their overall greenhouse-gas emissions by up to 47%, energy consumption by up to 41%, freshwater use by about half, and nutrient pollution from the wastewater by up to 64%, depending on the technologies used.”

These numbers suggest urine recycling would be a good thing, but will it “save the world?’  The critical element here is phosphorous.  Other elements exist in abundance.  Phosphorous does not, and life cannot exist without it.  Dan Egan explained why protecting its supply was critical in his book The Devil's Element: Phosphorus and a World Out of Balance.

“Phosphorus is essential for plant growth, and that makes it essential to us, but the element is important beyond helping to grow our food.  Phosphorus helps turn the meals we eat into the chemical energy that moves our muscles.  Phosphorus is also crucial to our physical structure, in the biggest ways and in the smallest.  Our bones and teeth are made with phosphorus.  Phosphorus is also in our DNA.  In fact, it is our DNA.  The rails of the famous twisting helices that form the genetic blueprints that bring to life every single cell on the planet is made of phosphorus.  From the corn we grow, to the animals that eat it, to the people who eat those animals, phosphorus is critical every step of the way.”

To provide the necessary fertilizer to feed the earth’s growing population we had to turn from phosphorous recycling schemes to mining geologic deposits.

“Mining industry officials maintain that there are enough reserves to last another 350 years while…some phosphorus experts contend that dangerously destabilizing shortages could come in a matter of decades.  But even the rosy 350-year horizon does not buy humanity much time.”

“…we are blowing through Earth’s accessible deposits at such a pace that…some scientists now fear that we could hit ‘peak phosphorus’ in just a matter of decades, at which point we risk declining mining yields—and chronic food scarcity.” 

“Florida miners are on pace to run out of available rock in as few as thirty years, at which point the United States is at risk of becoming dependent on other countries to sustain its agricultural system.”

“Whether those countries share an interest in maintaining our nutritional security is another question.  Roughly 70 to 80 percent of the globe’s remaining phosphorus reserves are located in Morocco and the Western Sahara territory that Morocco has occupied—sometimes violently—since the 1970s.  For one country, essentially one guy—the King of Morocco—to control so much of something every soul on the planet so desperately needs is a recipe for global instability, or worse.”

Now, recycling the bit of phosphorous that we usually disperse into our water systems with our urine should have more urgency.  But this effort will require a number of other actions if we are truly to maintain a sustainable supply of the element.  There are, however, other chemicals in our urine that should not be allowed into our water systems because they are not safe.  This source provides this claim.

“Approximately 70% of consumed pharmaceuticals are excreted in urine, and are subsequently subject to inadequate removal during conventional wastewater treatment. As a result, pharmaceuticals and associated metabolites are discharged into the environment.”

 Lest one think this is a negligible effect, consider this observation.

“Researchers took blood and tissue samples from 93 bonefish in Biscayne Bay and the Florida Keys since 2018, when the study started. They found each bonefish had an average of seven pharmaceuticals present, including blood pressure medications, antidepressants, prostate treatment medications, antibiotics and pain relievers, according to the release. One fish had a total of 17 different pharmaceuticals in its tissues.”

“The findings reflect a serious problem with ocean contamination from human wastewater, the university said.”

If the ocean is this polluted, what must our rivers and lakes be like?

Many of these pharmaceuticals are considered endocrine-disrupting chemicals which can fool a body into interacting with them as if they were a hormone thus causing unintended effects.  Human development, particularly in the fetal stage, requires hormones to appear at appropriate times and concentrations.  Allowing random molecules to disrupt this process is known to potentially modify development.  In The Decline in Male Fertility: An Existential Threat? We discussed how exposure to levels of endocrine disrupters at existing levels in our waterways can lead to the extinction of populations of small fish due to the eventual loss of the ability to reproduce.  It was also pointed out that human male sperm counts have fallen 50% in the last 40 years, a period of great growth in consumption of pharmaceutical products.  There is a correlation.  Is there causation?

Pharmaceuticals are not the only sources of endocrine disrupters, but they are clearly a significant contributor.  And there is no end to the increase in concentration in sight as we continue to increase our consumption of these drugs.  The simplest solution is to contain these chemicals at the source, which is human urine, rather than extract them at water treatment plants.

Chelsae Wald points out that urine diversion through toilet modifications is not just a university exercise.  Implementation attempts are being made in various locations.

“That practice, known as urine diversion, is being studied by groups in the United States, Australia, Switzerland, Ethiopia and South Africa, among other places.  The efforts reach far beyond the confines of university labs. Waterless urinals connect to basement treatment systems in offices in Oregon and the Netherlands. In Paris, there are plans to install urine-diverting toilets in a 1,000-resident eco-quarter being built in the 14th district of the city. The European Space Agency is to put 80 urine-diverting toilets into its Paris headquarters, which will begin operating later this year. According to proponents of urine diversion, it could see uses in sites from temporary military outposts to refugee encampments, rich urban centres and sprawling slums.”

Capturing human urine for reuse as a fertilizer is a good idea, but why not add the elimination of dangerous chemicals to the process before releasing urine into the environment?