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.