Stephen Colbert and James Loewen on FOX News' "War on History Textbooks"

by Clay Burell

categories: Education Politics, Mainstream Pundits, Teachers Ideas and Resources

Published May 01, 2009 @ 11:20AM PT

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Fox News wants schools to teach nationalism. I'd rather we teach patriotism. The two aren't the same.

Better still, let's teach recent history more, and distant history less, so high school graduates aren't unleashed into the real world with an understanding of history that ends with, say, the Vietnam War.

In Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Yout American History Textbook Got Wrong, James Loewen shares a useful way to think about history, compliments of African cultures. "Many African societies," he writes,

divide humans into three categories: those still alive on the earth, the sasha, and the zamani. The recently departed whose time on earth overlapped with people still here are the sasha, the living-dead. They are not wholly dead, for they still live in the memories of the living, who can call them to mind, create their likeness in art, and bring them to life in anecdote. When the last person to know an ancestor dies, that ancestor leaves the sasha for the zamani, the dead. Many, like George Washington or Clara Barton, can be recalled by name. But they are not living-dead. There is a difference.

Loewen applies this schema to an all-too-familiar peculiarity about how U.S. history is taught:

Authors of American history textbooks appear all too aware of the sasha - of the fact that teachers, parents, and textbook adoption board members were alive in the recent past. They seem uncomfortable with it. Revering the zamani - generalized ancestors - is more their style. By definition, the world of the sasha is controversial, because readers bring to it their own knowledge and understanding, so they may not agree with what is written. Therefore, the less said about the recent past, the better. (2d ed., 259-60)

Loewen spends the rest of the chapter documenting how U.S. history textbooks shy away from any analysis of events in the sasha period - Vietnam, the Iraq invasions, 9/11, social movements like feminism and gay rights - that may anger parents and other adults. He also documents how little coverage, in terms of total number of pages, each decade from 1960 onward receives in comparison with pre-1960s decades. He also notes that many teachers lack deep knowledge of these years, and so treat them to a superficial skim.

The upshot? Loewen:

The sasha is perhaps our most important past, because it is not dead but living-dead. Its theft by textbooks and teachers is the most wicked crime schools perpetrate on high school students, depriving them of perspective about the issues that most affect them. The semi-remembered factoids students carry with them about the Battle of Put-in-Bay or Silent Cal Coolidge do little to help them understand the world into which they move at graduation. [...] Leaving out the recent past ensures that students will take away little from their history courses that they can apply to the world (279).

FOX complains that too little is said about Islamist terrorism in chapters about 9/11. I might meet them there, if they'll meet me on this: more needs to be said in those textbooks about the background of U.S. Middle East policy from, say, 1900 to the present. Maybe a quote like this:

Bin Laden has been precise in telling America the reasons he is waging war on us. None of the reasons have anything to do with our freedom, liberty, and democracy, but have everything to do with U.S. policies and actions in the Muslim world (Loewen 266).

Before FOX rejects this as the anti-Americanism of some left-wing hack, they should digest the quote's source: Michael Scheuer, first chief on the CIA's bin Laden unit.

If we can handle a "fair and balanced" approach to the sasha, our students might graduate into democracy more than "bookful blockheads" who, come their moment in the voting booth, are frighteningly clueless.