from The Textbook Letter, November-December 1994
Victimist Delusions Are In.
Science and Technology Are Out.
William J. Bennetta
Like other commercial publishers, schoolbook companies exist for
the purpose of making money. And like other commercial
publishers, they produce what they think they can sell. This
approach can lead to the creation and marketing of some fine
books, but it can also lead to gross corruption and fraud.
These latter effects arise when companies care only about profit
and care nothing for knowledge, for ordinary honesty, or for
anything that might be called education. The production of
schoolbooks then becomes an exercise in pandering and pimping,
and the books themselves become collections of popular delusions,
faddish claptrap, and the propaganda dispensed by pressure
groups.
That is why we must give some attention to a new document called
National Standards for United States History, which purports to
be an array of federal standards for teaching American history in
grades 5 through 12.
The "history" that this document puts forth is so obviously laden
with duplicity, ideological flatus and vulgar phantasms that we
might be tempted to dismiss the whole thing with a laugh. That
would be a mistake, however. The people who directed the
concocting of National Standards for United States History are
promoting it as a milestone in "education reform" and are trying
to make educators believe that it is legitimate and
intellectually respectable. If they succeed in these efforts to
make their product fashionable, then unprincipled publishers
will surely rush to produce textbooks that mimic National
Standards for United States History in scope, content and detail.
We therefore should be aware of what this document is and what it
tries to do.
Several critics have already published essays that expose and
challenge National Standards for United States History as a
whole. In the present article I would like to consider some
particular matters that most other commentators have overlooked:
The writers of National Standards for United States History have
erased science and medicine from our country's story, have
relentlessly hidden our achievements and global leadership in
technology, and have virtually ignored the ways in which
technology has shaped American history and American life. By so
doing, the writers have precluded the possibility that their
"history" might provide any legitimate picture of our past or any
valid basis for understanding our present.
Before I can describe those specific outrages, however, I must
tell a little about how National Standards for United States
History is constructed and about how the writers peddle their
ideology. I believe that the writers' refusal to deal with
science, medicine and technology as major historical forces is
deliberate, is a manifestation of the writers' ideological bent,
and must be seen in an ideological context.
Slick but Bogus
The document before us was issued in late October by the National
Center for History in the Schools, based at the University of
California at Los Angeles (UCLA). The document's whole title is
National Standards for United States History: Exploring the
American Experience: Grades 5-12, and that title is misleading.
There are no national standards for teaching American history,
and there won't be any such standards unless a federal panel
certifies and promulgates them. So far, that hasn't happened.
The context for understanding this is supplied by Public Law
103-227, the "Goals 2000: Educate America Act," which was signed by
President Clinton in March 1994 and which provided for the development of
"voluntary national content standards and
voluntary national student performance standards that define what
all students should know and be able to do" in several realms,
including English, mathematics, science, history and geography.
To certify such standards, the Act called for a National
Education Standards and Improvement Council, whose members were
to be appointed by the president. So far, no appointments have
been made.
National Standards for United States History does not disclose
that. Nicely printed and sporting a four-color cover, it looks
like a formal, definitive publication, and it carries a highly
misleading preface which cites the Goals 2000 Act and creates the
impression that National Standards for United States History is
one of the sets of standards that the Act envisioned. There is
nothing to tell the reader that, in the context of the Act, the
UCLA document is (at most) an uncertified proposal. The preface
is signed by Charlotte Crabtree and Gary B. Nash, identified as
"Project Co-directors."
National Standards for United States History, then, is a bogus
item. It is not what it appears to be. Knowing this is all the
more important because the UCLA people have sent many copies of
it to educators throughout the country. Maybe they thought that
if they printed a slick document and then distributed it widely,
they could create a bandwagon effect that would serve their
purposes.
Thomas Alva Who?
Even before National Standards for United States History was
released to the public, its content and contortions were decried
in an essay by Lynne V. Cheney, a fellow of the American
Enterprise Institute (Washington, D.C.). The essay, titled "The
End of History," appeared in The Wall Street Journal on 20
October. Cheney said that UCLA's product pandered to "the forces
of political correctness," that it ignored or trivialized
important events, themes and persons, and that its picture of the
United States was warped and disparaging. To me, some of her
charges seemed incredible. For example, I found it hard to
believe that UCLA's version of American history included a
14th-century African king but eliminated Edison, Bell and the Wright
brothers; nor could I imagine that it mentioned Harriet Tubman
six times but didn't cite Robert E. Lee at all. In fact,
however, those charges were true.
Cheney's assessment had special significance because she had been
chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities from May
1986 until January 1993, and she had approved an NEH grant that
helped the UCLA organization to develop and produce their
"standards." Now, in her Wall Street Journal piece, she asserted
that the UCLA people had not complied with statements made in
their grant application. The UCLA document, she said, was not
the product that the NEH had been led to expect.
Cheney renewed her charges on 26 October, when she confronted
Gary B. Nash on The MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour. She said that the
UCLA crew had cast the story of the United States in terms of
failure and oppression, with very little sense of the country's
greatness, and she again deplored the omission of important
figures. What about Edison, for example?
Nash replied that the UCLA folks were not trying to compile
names. "That's what we want to get away from," he said. "We do
ask students to understand the role that technology has played in
American work, American life, the American economy. But we do
not tot up lists of names for students to absorb and spit back .
. . ." (That was nonsense. In truth, National Standards for
United States History is full of names, including the names of
people who are notable only for their lack of notability.)
Margaret Warner, the Newshour journalist who moderated the
exchange between Cheney and Nash, now supplied the assumption
that students would somehow learn about Edison "in learning about
technology," even though the UCLA document ignored him. Nash
accepted Warner's gift and said:
"Of course [students] would, and that would be in the textbooks,
I would imagine, though it is up to textbook-writers to put all
of the people and dates and places in." (That was tommyrot. The only
textbook-industry people who would ever consider basing a book on
the UCLA product are the panderers and shady operators. And as
we know from long experience, such people meet curriculum
standards by doing whatever mentioning they think is necessary --
and no more than that. If Edison isn't in the standards, you
can bet your filament that he won't be in any schoolbook that
the shady operators might produce.)
Edison turned up again, a few minutes later, with a signal
result. Cheney said to Nash: "In this document, you leave behind
the Thomas Edisons, you leave behind the Wright brothers, you
leave behind many of the heroic and significant figures in the
past, in the name of a more politically correct version of our
story."
Nash's only answer was: "If I had included Wright and Edison, Ms.
Cheney, would you have noticed the absence of a black inventor
and a female inventor?"
So there it was -- out in the open. For Nash, apparently, an
inventor's historical significance depended on the inventor's
race and sex, and "history" was a matter of juggling racial
counts and sexual quotas. Nash even seemed to think Cheney would
be remiss if she didn't go along with that nonsense and didn't
join him in noticing whether his quotas had been satisfied. (By
the way, what Nash implied when he spoke about "the absence of a
black inventor" was quite false. Of the very few technologists
who are mentioned in the UCLA document, at least two are blacks.
Both are noteworthy, but neither is in the same league with, say,
Edison or the Wrights.)
Now that we have an idea of what Nash is, we can look more
closely at the document that he is promoting.
Eyewash and Indians
The body of National Standards for United States History
comprises four chapters, and the first two of these (occupying
pages 1 through 33) seem cogent and good. In chapter 1,
"Developing Standards in United States History for Students in
Grades 5-12," the writers observe that knowledge of history is
essential to political intelligence: "Without history," they say,
"a society shares no common memory of where it has been, what its
core values are, or what decisions of the past account for
present circumstances." The writers then set out fourteen
criteria for developing standards (starting with "Standards
should be intellectually demanding, reflect the best historical
scholarship, and promote active questioning and learning . . .")
and they introduce three pedagogic principles: periodization,
historical understanding, and historical thinking.
Chapter 2, "Standards in Historical Thinking," develops the last
of those principles, and it offers sound ideas such as these:
[The students] should learn to avoid "present-mindedness" by not
judging the past solely in terms of the norms and values of
today, but taking into account the historical context in which
the events unfolded [page 23]. . . . [Students should not
conceive] that events have unfolded inevitably -- that the way
things are is the way they had to be . . . . Unless students can
conceive that history could have turned out differently, they may
unconsciously accept the notion that the future is also
inevitable or predetermined, and that human agency and individual
action count for nothing. [page 26]. . . . [T]eachers should not
use critical events to hammer home a particular "moral lesson" or
ethical teaching. Not only will many students reject that
approach; it fails also to take into account the processes
through which students acquire the complex skills of principled
thinking and moral reasoning [page 31].
These guidelines (and many of the others in chapter 2) are fine.
But unfortunately, they seem to serve chiefly as eyewash, for
they are not honored in the rest of the document. This is one of
the things we see when we turn to chapter 3, "United States
History Standards for Grades 5-12," which fills 212 pages.
In chapter 3 the writers divide American history into ten
periods, starting with "Era 1: Three Worlds Meet (Beginnings to
1620)" and ending with "Era 10: Contemporary United States (1968
to the present)," and they present two to four standards for each
era -- 31 standards in all. Then, for each standard, they list
criteria that can be used in judging whether students have done
the required learning, and they give "examples of student
achievement."
These examples form the bulk of the chapter and define the real
nature of the UCLA document: Rather than being a concise
declaration of standards, National Standards for United States
History is actually an elaborate curriculum that often attains
considerable detail in prescribing what students should read,
which persons they should know about, and what political views they should
absorb.
This curriculum is pervaded by multi-culti, and it shows many of
multi-culti's ideological elements -- e.g., tribalism,
anti-intellectualism, Victimism (including the sanitization and
glorification of fashionable Victims), imaginary anthropology,
and an undisguised animosity toward Europeans (or "whites").
Things get off to a rousing start as the writers purport to deal
with the convergence of American Indians, Europeans and Africans
in the New World. There are, in fact, some good ideas here. For
example, students are to learn about various Indian cultures,
with attention to such things as languages, origin myths, foods,
agricultural practices, tools, cultural traditions, and social
organization; and they are to learn about West African peoples,
with attention to things like folklore, family structures,
political structures, works of art, and even "the achievements
and grandeur" of the court of Mansa Musa (a 14th-century king of
Mali). But wait: Where's the analogous stuff about the
Europeans? Aren't the students supposed to study some European
cultures and learn about European origin myths, folklore, foods,
political structures, agricultural practices, tools, machinery,
religious practices, languages, literature, music, and so on?
No. Nor are they to learn about the "achievements and grandeur"
of any court in, say, Italy. Europeans are to be viewed, almost
entirely, in terms of their shipbuilding and navigational skills,
their ideas about the "power of the individual," and their
propensities for voyaging, exploring and conquering.
That's bad, but we find worse when we look at some of the
specific distortions that mark the UCLA crowd's depiction of
Indians. For instance, we don't see anything about how any
Indians waged war, carried out conquests, or practiced slavery,
although various groups of Indians did all those things.
(National Standards for United States History evidently seeks to
affirm the fashionable Victimist delusion that slavery was
unknown in the New World until it was introduced by Europeans.)
We do, however, see a number of noble-savage fantasies, such as
this "example of student achievement" on page 56:
Compare Native
American and European views of the land. How did European
beliefs in private property and in their claim to lands that were
not "settled" or "improved" differ from Native American beliefs
that land was not property, but [was] entrusted by the Creator to
all living creatures for their common benefit and shared use?
That is nonsense. Like all the other humans of whom I am aware,
the Indians of North America were territorial. Specific groups
of Indians (whether they lived in fixed communities or in nomadic
bands) claimed control over specific territories, and they used
force to repel interlopers. Manifestly, these were not the
actions of people who regarded land as something available for
shared use by all; they were the actions of people who regarded
land as property. Indian concepts of property may not have
matched the concepts held by many Europeans, and Indian ideas
about the control of land may have focused more strongly on
consumable resources (such as prey or water) than on the land per
se, but it is undeniable that Indians made proprietary claims to
territories and fought to defend those claims. Comparisons
between Indian modes of control and some European modes could
yield useful ecological and anthropological insights. Instead,
the UCLA document promotes pious tripe that might have come from
a Victim-of-the-Week handout or from a pamphlet about Stone Age
saints.
Here is another "example of student achievement" with some more
fake anthropology:
Draw upon anthropological and historical
data to develop a sound historical argument on such questions as:
Were Native American societies "primitive," as the first
Europeans to encounter them believed, or had these societies
developed complex patterns of social organization, trading
networks, and political culture?
I needn't explain that the
whole thing is bogus and deceptive, right down to its false
implication that "primitive" and "complex" denote opposite or
antithetical conditions. But I must note that the writers'
so-called question isn't a question at all: It telegraphs the
"correct" answer that the writers' ideology requires, leaving no
real possibility that the student will find that the Indians were
primitive.
This sort of bald, ideological manipulation recurs at various
places in the UCLA product. Here is another case involving
Indians -- an "example of student achievement" on page 57:
"Develop a historical argument or debate on the long-term effects
of the fur trade, considering for example its destruction of
animal life; its disruption of traditional Native American relationships
with the environment; and its effects in pitting
tribe against tribe as their hunting grounds became depleted and
they sought to conquer more distant tribes whose resources had
not yet been exhausted."
Develop a "debate"? About what? There is no question there.
The whole passage is just a lot of wailing about what the evil
fur trade did to some Victims. When Diane Ravitch analyzed
UCLA's document in Education Week for 7 December, she noted that
same passage and she observed that it displays
present-mindedness and the preaching of a moral lesson -- two things that
the UCLA writers supposedly rejected back in chapter 2.
Robert E. What?
As the UCLA curriculum moves through later historical periods,
the writers continue to display their ideological fixations,
especially their dedication to Victimism. For example, they show
a crankish, distortive preoccupation with slavery and with the
fortunes of blacks (both before and after slavery was abolished),
and this produces "history" that is warped, preachy, lugubrious
and sometimes ludicrous.
The section on "Era 5: Civil War and Reconstruction (1850-1877)"
seems fantastic. Yes, it really does ignore Robert E. Lee, and
of course it ignores Stonewall Jackson, J.E.B. Stuart, Joseph
Johnston and all the other eminent officers who led the armies of
the Confederacy. Do Union officers fare any better? Not by
much. As far as I can see, the only ones who turn up are Grant
and Sherman -- each mentioned once, in the same sentence.
But not to worry. While there is no acknowledgment of Lee,
Jackson or Stuart, or of Sheridan, Hooker or Meade, the writers
make up for this by producing such names as Belle Boyd, Rose
Greenhow, Charlotte Forten, Robert Elliott, Hiram Revels, Blanche
Bruce and B.S. Pinchback -- the last three of these being
"African Americans who served in state and national offices"
during Reconstruction. Plainly, UCLA's version of the Civil War
and Reconstruction has less to do with history than with meeting
quotas and with trying to apply a patina of notability to figures
promoted by pressure groups.
One effect of the document's pervasive attention to Victimism,
tribalism and other faddish eccentricities is to underscore the
writers' marked aversion to intellectual history and to the
history of American scholarship. National Standards for United
States History is given almost wholly to the writers' odd forms
of political and social "history"; there is little about this
country's intellectual life, and even less to tell that the
United States has been the home of intellectual giants, from
Benjamin Franklin's time to this very day. Students are to read
biographies and diaries of slaves and ex-slaves, but I see
nothing about reading the diaries of university scholars.
Students are to learn about black churches, but not about the
great American research institutions. They are to learn about
the founding of the NAACP, but not about the founding of any
engineering society, medical society or art museum. They are to
learn about the travails of displaced Indians, but not about the
triumphs of distinguished physicists and physicians.
This brings me, at last, to my analysis of the aberration that I
cited at the start of this article: The UCLA writers have erased
science and medicine from American history, have ignored or
trivialized the cultural roles of technology, and have hidden our
country's identity as the foremost scientific and technological
power of the 20th century. I do not find that surprising in a
document dominated by multi-culti ideology. It reflects, I
believe, the multi-culti crowd's deep aversion to science and to
acknowledging the global triumph of this unique intellectual
system, which was developed, only a few hundred years ago, by
Europeans.
Ignoring a Mighty Record
In his book Magic, Science, and Civilization, published in 1978,
Jacob Bronowski made a potent observation that, I believe, must
be understood by anyone who claims to be educated:
There has been an irreversible step in the cultural evolution of
man; it took place at the beginning of the scientific revolution
from, say, 1500 to 1700, and it will never be undone. We are
committed to a scientific way of thinking and to what it entails,
a technological way of acting, and we cannot go back. . . . The
step that was taken in the scientific revolution . . . was just
as radical as the invention of agriculture, the invention of writing,
the invention of poetry and art, or the invention of
urban life. All of those are things which we now take for
granted in our civilization, but all were irreversible steps, and
from the moment that they took place human life changed and
nothing could turn it back.
Quite so. And no one can have a hope of comprehending our
history unless he comprehends that our world is a product of the
scientific revolution and the "technological way of acting" that
science has engendered. Science has been the great intellectual
adventure of modern times, providing a radically new
understanding of our place in the universe, radically new
perceptions of ourselves, and new perceptions of how we can
influence and enjoy the material world.
Notice (as a rather mundane example) how your own attitudes,
hopes and decisions are influenced by your expectations of how
long you and your relatives will live; and recognize that your
expectations are reflections of science. Since 1905, overall
life expectancy in the United States has increased from less than
50 years to more than 75, and the rise has been due largely to
applications of science and scientific medicine in the realm of
public health.
At a deeper level, notice how your world view has been shaped by
the principle on which the scientific revolution was built --
the idea that all of nature conforms to laws which humans can
discover but can't alter. Maybe you don't often think about
that principle in a deliberate way, but it is always with you: It
is, for example, the foundation of your understanding that such
phenomena as tides or storms can be predicted and explained, and
it is the reason why you don't think that tides are conjured by
demons or that storms can be stopped by magical incantations.
Science's niche in American culture and history has another
dimension as well, for the United States has produced illustrious
scientists who have influenced the development of every major
discipline, from astronomy, geology and geography to chemistry,
biology and paleontology. Here is a mighty record indeed. It
starts with Franklin's inquiries into electricity (not to mention
his discovery of the Gulf Stream), and it extends to the present:
Since 1930 or so, more Nobel Prizes for work in the natural
sciences have been awarded to Americans than to citizens of any
other country.
None of this is even acknowledged, let alone developed, in
National Standards for United States History. In the opening
chapter of eyewash, UCLA's writers suggest that students should
learn about "history of science and technology" to gain
understandings of "the scientific quest to understand nature,"
but then they shut science out. Unless I've missed something,
the 212-page chapter of standards has only one substantive
reference to scientific affairs. On page 95, students are to
find out why Lewis and Clark's journey of exploration is
"considered one of the most successful scientific expeditions in
United States history."
What about individual scientists? As far as I can tell, UCLA's
product mentions only four people (other than Lewis and Clark)
who contributed to "the scientific quest." Two of these,
however, don't count: Franklin and Jefferson are viewed only as
political or diplomatic figures, with no acknowledgment of their
scientific work. The two others are Benjamin Banneker
(1731-1806) and George Washington Carver (1864-1943), two blacks who
apparently have been included for the sake of filling some quota.
What about medicine and surgery? What about Americans who made
signal contributions to, say, epidemiology, immunology, medical
microbiology, anesthesiology, or cardiology? And what about the
ways in which advances in such fields have affected American
life? Those things are simply ignored.
What about technology? Though UCLA's writers have dumped Edison
and the Wrights, they actually have retained some of the other
great-inventors-and-great-inventions stuff that we all grew up
with: Ford, McCormick, Whitney, steam engines, agricultural
machines, Civil War weaponry, World War 1 weaponry, and a few
other items. It all adds up to very little, and it doesn't
begin to suggest a country of people committed to a technological
way of acting. Much worse, the UCLA document is almost oblivious
to the technology of the 50 years since World War 2. (You will
find this hard to believe, but it is so.)
To me, it seems that the exclusion of science from the UCLA
document was deliberate. I have inspected the appendix which
lists the individuals and groups that allegedly took part in the
document's genesis, and I have found that it does not show the
History of Science Society or any representative of that
organization. Nor do I find any academy of science, any academy
of medicine, or any technological museum. I infer, therefore,
that the process of writing National Standards for United States
History was framed and managed in a way that would deny attention
to the history of technological, medical or scientific endeavors.
In a context of multi-culti, this appears to make sense. The
ideologues of multi-culti embrace a sort of broad-spectrum
anti-intellectualism, of course, but they also seem to harbor a
specific, particularly intense hostility toward science,
scientific medicine and science-based technology. This, I
believe, reflects their resentment of some essential facts:
Science is the only intellectual system that lets us understand
nature and make reliable predictions about the natural world;
science was created by Europeans; and science has reshaped
societies all over the globe, chiefly by replacing magic and
superstition with rational ways of acquiring verifiable
knowledge.
In the realm of education, the multi-culti types use three major
strategies for denying those facts:
- They deride or trivialize science, depicting it as a mere
collection of invented beliefs -- a cultural affectation that is
favored by "whites" but is no different from folklore.
- They acknowledge the usefulness of science, but they pretend
that there isn't anything new or European about it. They invent
stories that attribute imaginary scientific and technological
discoveries to whomever they like (and especially to alleged
ancestors of popular Victims), and they hope no one will expose
these stories as lies.
- They do their best to ignore science and all it has wrought.
They do their best to pretend that science never happened. From
my own reading of National Standards for United States History, I
conclude that this strategy was adopted by the crew at UCLA.
History educators and science educators alike should scorn UCLA's
mess of fake anthropology and cross-eyed "history," and they
should resolve that any schoolbooks which may be based on such
rubbish will be rejected.
•
I thank Robert L. Park, of the American Physical Society, for his
Internet alert of 21 October, which broadcast the fact that the
UCLA bunch had expunged science from American history.
William J. Bennetta is a professional editor, a fellow of the
California Academy of Sciences, the president of The Textbook
League, and the editor of The Textbook Letter. He writes
frequently about the propagation of quackery, false "science" and
false "history" in schoolbooks.
Addendum
Crabtree and Nash's package of "standards" for American history was
thoroughly exposed for what it was, and so was a phony document that
Crabtree and Nash had tried to pass off as a collection of official
federal standards for teaching world history. In January 1995,
both documents were denounced by the United States Senate. Even so,
Crabtree and Nash continued to promote their fake documents and
continued to deal in misrepresentation and deceit. See "Senate Denounces 'History Standards';
Federal-Standards Effort Appears Dead" in The Textbook
Letter, January-February 1995.
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