Media Musings: School textbooks dodge the truth
As if there aren’t enough problems associated with public schools, now comes word once again of how poor and often erroneous our school textbooks are, especially in history. To the burdened parent, this is troubling news but to those living inside the battleground of textbook selection, it’s an old and sad story that’s been around a long, long time. The reasons are both old and new blended into a toxic mix of politics, ethnic pride, religion, and $4 billion of taxpayer dollars.
Noted historian Diane Ravitch, of Columbia University, headed this latest effort, funded by The Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a Washington-based think tank working for education reform.
The selection of textbooks at the state-level began after the Civil War when Southern states decided to “dictate” how the story of the war was told. Today, Ravich said, most of the 22 states running textbook adoption on a state-wide basis are in the South. Tennessee is one of those states.
It was effective for generations, as black Americans were written out of the histories, ignoring, for example, that 188,000 of them fought on the side of the North in the Civil War, a number greater than the entire U.S. Army in 1939. America was given its first universal history lesson in the movie, “Glory,” after which I heard so many whites and blacks say they knew nothing of the courage and losses encountered by blacks in that war.
There is the attack on America’s founding on the basis of Western philosophy and thought, dominated by the British. It’s just the ideas of old dead white men, the argument goes.
African-Americans argue the cradle of civilization was in Africa, most notably Egypt, which was black, and Greece was a late-comer. That’s intellectual rubbish but it is an understandable posture when one considers the massive contributions of African-Americans to the nation, their hundreds of years of repression, and the great story of their use of civil disobedience to finally gain personal and political freedom in America. In Texas, whites testified the books had too much about African-Americans at the expense of whites, especially about Martin Luther King, Jr.
Even so, ultra-conservative researcher Mel and Norma Gabler found the history books to be filled with egregious errors of easily found facts. They still argue there should be history books filled with the fact America was and is founded solely on Judeo-Christian values.
Then there are Native Americans, Asian-Americans, and finally Puerto-Rican/Latino. The positions are made more forcefully depending on the area of the nation holding hearings. Each has a place. Each should be included.
So, let’s get to the heart of what’s going on here. Cultural pluralism is a necessity in ethnically diverse America. We had hoped at one time to be one race, a new race, of all peoples, all races, all creeds, all colors. But we are not a melting pot and we are now re-segregating America.
Lucinen Ellington, a University of Tennessee-Chattanooga professor, served on the world history panel and said the state’s policies have a negative impact on student learning because of the hearing-business negotiations. In summary: The books are tortured compromises.
What is at stake may be our very soul. Twisted histories will lead us unable to intellectually equip our own people to live celebrating both diversity and our national identity. Our history gives us our values and we are sending our young and the brave to die for them again.
We must demand teachers alone are empowered to select texts based on our best scholarship, driven not be the forces now openly at play, but by allegiance to the truth as best we can tell it at any given time.
(Ed Kimbrell is a professor in MTSU’s School of Journalism.)