Here’s a follow up on “Teaching US History, Florida-style from The History News Network.
Gov. Jeb Bush just signed into law an omnibus education bill that includes this adomintion to the states social studies teachers: “American history shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed, shall be viewed as knowable, teachable and testable, and shall be defined as the creation of a new nation based largely on the universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.”
In his short article titled“A Florida law banning relativism in classes ignores reality and 75 years of academic tradition”, Jonathan Zimmerman, a historian at NYU, points out that the Florida law banning revisionist history in public schools is itself based on revisionist history (and, as a matter of fact, wrong). Zimmerman points out that
Hardly a brainchild of the flower-power ’60s, the concept of historical interpretation has been at the heart of our profession from the 1920s onward. Before that time, to be sure, some historians believed that they could render a purely factual and objective account of the past. But most of them had given up on what historian Charles Beard called the “noble dream” by the interwar period, when scholars came to realize that the very selection of facts was an act of interpretation.
That’s why Cornell’s Carl Becker chose the title “Everyman His Own Historian” for his 1931 address to the American Historical Assn., probably the most famous short piece of writing in our profession. In it, Becker explained why “Everyman” — that is, the average layperson — inevitably interpreted the facts of his or her own life, remembering certain elements and forgetting (or distorting) others. …
Becker was an optimist. Although historians could never determine the capital-T “Truth,” he wrote, they could get progressively closer to it by asking new questions, collecting new facts and constructing new interpretations.
Nevertheless, he concluded his 1931 address on a pessimistic note: Unless the profession engaged lay readers — unless, that is, we taught the public about what we actually do — Americans would reject history itself, taking comfort in banal pieties and sugarcoated myths.
But of course banal pieties and sugarcoated myths are what the Florida legislature is trying to ensure are taught in social studies classrooms across the state.
For more see: occams hatchet at Daily Kos.
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Frankly I’m suprised that conservatives want to focus on “facts,” considering that the accumulated factual evidence of the U.S. as a colonial racist settler state is pretty overwhelming! This won’t help their cause.
However, I suspect that this new “factual and knowable” history won’t include an in-depth discussion of the naturalization laws used to deny citizenship to non-whites. I also suspect that the evidence of labor suppression will be dismissed as “interpretation.”
I’m detecting a trend- if it’s favorable to the U.S. image, it will be factual. If it is factual, but tends to lead to critical inquiry about this perfect image, it will be declared “relative” and left out of the curriculum. Kind of like the use of the term “scientific” applied to NCLB. Science is only science if it supports the business interests/status quo view of education.
Philospher George Santayana once said:
“History is always written wrong and so always needs to be re-written”
Florida’s legislation is simply one more effort to take control the curriculum from teachers. The control of the curriculum is being gradually eroded by policy wonks who believe that curriculum is something that is best specifically defined, with no room for interpretation. It’s much cleaner to have one view rather than the dozens of perspectives that a reasonable intellectual would see as rationale and inevitable. But let’s be honest, the Florida legislation is not rational, reasonable or intellectual.
I still have faith that reason and intellect will untimately win the day over one singular view of the curriculum such as we now see in the actions of the Florida legislature. Most significant and enduring change in education has taken place from the bottom up. Top down efforts such as that in Florida will never win the hearts and minds of the hard working intellectuals in the classroom.
Fight the power…
pmm