Don't Know Much About History?

The Texas State Board of Education has been in the news a lot since March when they held hearings on revising the social studies curriculum standards. Now that the standards are up for final adoption, I was curious to see what was really in them. After wading through 87 pages of standards, they are a curious mix of micro-managing, bad grammar and anti-political correctedness. While the influence of the conservatives on the board is apparent, it strikes me that the liberals and conservatives have reduced history to a long list of names that must be taught. Teachers are also placed in the unique position of being required to teach history which is still occurring.

Names, Names and More Names

Students frequently complain that history is nothing more than a list of dates and places. Under the State Board of Education standards, there are endless lists of names to be taught. Included in the proposed standards for American History since 1877 (formerly known as American History Since Reconstruction) are:

Benjamin Rush, John Hancock, John Jay, John Witherspoon, John Peter Muhlenberg, Charles Carroll, and Jonathan Trumbull (examples of Founding Fathers), Henry Cabot Lodge, Alfred Thayer Mahan, Theodore Roosevelt and Samuel Dole (persons involved in American expansionism, formerly known as Imperialism), General John J. Pershing, Woodrow Wilson, Upton Sinclair, Susan B. Anthony, Ida B. Wells, and W. E. B. DuBois (reformers and muckrakers), Clarence Darrow, William Jennings Bryan, Henry Ford,
Glenn Curtiss, Marcus Garvey,and Charles A. Lindbergh (significant individuals from the 1920s), Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Omar Bradley, Dwight Eisenhower, Douglas MacArthur, Chester A. Nimitz, George Marshall, and George Patton (military leaders during World War II), John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., César Chavez, Rosa Parks, and Betty Friedan (civil rights leaders), George Wallace, Orval Faubus, and Lester Maddox (advocates for the status quo), Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Phyllis Schlafly, Bill Gates, Sam Walton, Estée Lauder, Robert Johnson and Lionel Sosa (examples of American entrepeneurs, but Mary Kay Ash didn't make the final cut), Andrew Carnegie, Hector P. Garcia, Thurgood Marshall, Billy Graham, Barry Goldwater, Phyllis Schlafly, and Hillary Clinton (examples of social leaders), Frances Willard, Jane Addams, Eleanor Roosevelt, Dolores Huerta, and Oprah Winfrey (women who made contributions to society), Vernon J. Baker, Alvin York, and Roy Benavides (Congressional Medal of Honor winners).

These are just the names contained in the standards for one course. There is a curious parity here. Conservatives get Phyllis Schlafly (who is mentioned twice) and Barry Goldwater, while liberals get Hillary Clinton and Oprah Winfrey. African Americans get Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King and Marcus Garvey, while Hispanics get Lionel Sosa, Cesear Chavez and Roy Benavides. It looks like the State Board tried to be evenhanded by letting every group get someone in the standards. Some of the lists seem pretty random.

History or Current Events?

I once had a history professor who said that anything after the Seventeenth Century wasn't history, it was current events. Under that definition, the standards contain a lot of VERY current events. For example, a section on dates as turning points includes "2001 (terrorist attacks on World Trade Center and the Pentagon) and 2008 (election of first black president)."

In another standard, students are required to:

describe the causes, key organizations, and individuals of the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract with America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority, and the National Rifle Association.

Students are also required to learn about the presidential election of 2000, the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

Do we really know the significance of these events well enough to mandate that textbook publishers include them in history books? Since when does last year qualify as history?

Anti-Political Correctness

The attempt to re-write history in a more conservative manner has already received plenty of attention, so I won't dwell on it. However, here are a few points that I haven't seen emphasized elsewhere:

In the standards for World History Studies, all of the references to "BCE" as a dating measure have gone back to "B.C.," so that history is measured in relation to Christ.

American imperialism is changed to American expansionism, while Soviet expansion is changed to Soviet aggression.

The Standard dealing with McCarthyism as a factor which heated up the Cold War has received an addenda about "how the later release of the Venona Papers confirmed suspicions of communist infiltration in U.S. government."

The standards now refer to the "leadership" of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan as opposed to their "role."

More Randomness

Some of the other interesting things that students will be asked to do are:

* analyze the function of the U.S. Office of War Information (during World War II).

* understand the effects of governmental actions on individuals, industries, and communities, including the impact of Fifth Amendment property rights.

* describe the emergence of monetary policy in the United States, including the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 and the shifting trend from a gold standard to fiat money.

* analyze causes of economic growth and prosperity in the 1920s Economics, including Warren Harding’s Return to Normalcy, reduced taxes, and increased production efficiencies

* analyze the effects of 20th-century landmark U.S. Supreme Court decisions, including Brown v. Board of Education and other U.S. Supreme Court decisions such as Hernandez v. Texas, Delgado v. Bastrop I. S. D.and Tinker v. Des Moines.

* evaluate constitutional change in terms of strict construction versus judicial interpretation.

* describe how American values are different and unique from those of other nations.

Final Thoughts

Inevitably, the telling of history is a process of sorting through what is worth mentioning and what can be left out. However, in reading the standards, it is easy to get the impression that the State Board of Education went tripping casually through history grabbing items to include without regard to their big picture importance. While some of these items are clearly influenced by a conservative philosophy, others are just random. The result is an incoherent mass of detail that will be difficult to put into a textbook and harder still to teach. I have one daughter who is already taking American History under the current standards. I can't wait till it is time to help daughter #2 with her homework under the new ones.