The Troubling Assumptions Behind Lamar Alexander's History Project
According to Alexander, good history teaching helps students understand the core values at the center of our government system. "From the founding of America," he declared on the Senate floor when he introduced this legislation, "we have always understood how important it is for citizens to understand the principles that unite us as a country. . . . To become an American citizen, you subscribe to those principles."
He continued: "[I]f most of our politics and government is about applying to our most urgent problems the principles and characteristics that make us the exceptional United States of America, then we had better get about the teaching and learning of those principles and characteristics."
At a time when the news is littered with stories of basic facts about American history that students do not know, this bill has received broad bipartisan support. In the Senate, it garnered 37 co-sponsors and passed 90-0 on June 20th. The act now awaits approval in the House of Representatives. [Editor's Note: On July 18 the National Coalition for History reported that the bill may not be funded.]
Unfortunately, the Alexander bill has not received the close scrutiny it deserves. The educational philosophy behind it is a relic of the Cold War and even though support for the bill is bipartisan, its passage would facilitate the passage of many partisan policies.
To those of us who teach the history of the study of American history (also known as historiography), the idea that Americans are united by a set of common beliefs is known as "consensus history." Consensus history developed in the 1950s as a way to demonstrate the superiority of democratic ideals in the United States over the communist doctrines of the Soviet Union.
It is no coincidence that Alexander cited perhaps the preeminent consensus historian of the 1950s, Richard Hofstadter, to support his legislation. "It has been our fate as a nation," Hofstadter wrote, "not to have ideologies but to be one." In her book History's Memory, Ellen Fitzpatrick reminds us that consensus history was never the preeminent school of historiography in America, yet presumably Lamar Alexander would make it the guiding philosophy behind all public history and civics instruction.
To Alexander, the years immediately preceding 1960 were a kind of golden age for history and civics education in the United States. Then the educational reforms of the 1960s and 1970s led American students astray by celebrating "multiculturalism and bilingualism and diversity at a time when there should have been more emphasis on a common culture and learning English and unity."
For historians, the 1960s marked the beginning of the so-called "New Social History." Around this time, scholars began to take scholarship in new directions, examining the history of largely overlooked groups like African Americans, women and working-class people with a new sense of urgency. The insights gained from this research have contributed to greater understanding of how these groups affected many aspects of American history in general.
Therefore, Democrats in the House who are considering voting for this legislation should understand that it is an attack on the legitimacy (and therefore the power) of some of their most important constituencies. For example, the resurgence of consensus history would de-emphasize the importance of American labor history. If students do not understand the reasons that workers struggled to gain collective bargaining rights, it will be easier for conservatives to chip away at them, like the Bush administration did last year by eliminating these rights for Department of Homeland Security employees.
By emphasizing consensus over the teaching of African American history, students will not recognize the depth of struggle that people like Martin Luther King, Jr. faced in getting the government to enforce constitutional provisions guaranteeing civil rights for all races. This will make it easier to argue that racism is a thing of the past and affirmative action is unnecessary.
As important as the stories of these groups are to the overall narrative of American history, the problems with the Alexander bill are more than just sins of omission. Even if American students should know more about the founding fathers, the Civil War and other such topics, the kind of patriotic boasting that this bill encourages helps perpetuate an environment of continuous war.
As George Packer writes in the most recent issue of Mother Jones, "Morality, in the form of the universal principals articulated in the Declaration of Independence" is the foundation of the neo-conservative foreign policy that led to the current conflict in Iraq and threatens to cause future wars. "Conservative idealism sees America and goodness as identical. Its logic proclaims, We are righteous; therefore what we do is right. This is a functional definition of zealotry, and it is not given to second thoughts or moral complexity. It leads to hubris and self-blindness; it lacks what idealism most needs, a check on its own tendency to overreach and detach itself from human reality."
It should be the job of historians to provide material to help prevent America from making these kinds of mistakes. Instead, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld has offered a controversial take of post-Revolutionary America to argue that Iraq is now doing fine. As Mary Beth Norton explained in the New York Times recently, "the basic interpretation of American history [Rumsfeld] advances is so ancient it creaks." Indeed, "it has essentially been dead for at least 50 years."
No wonder President Bush is so down on revisionists. Recent historical scholarship undermines the consensus he is trying to build for many of his policies. And if the Alexander bill passes, fewer students will be able to use history as a means to question the President's conservative agenda.
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