History Standards Assault Western Culture
A funny thing happened to the National History Standards on their way to a famous forum: They were denounced by the U.S. Senate by a vote of 99-1.
This is a major turning point in the debate. The standards are, as Washington Sen. Slade Gorton said, “perverse.” Loaded up with crude antiWestern and anti-American propaganda. But until now, the authors of this mess have been able to pose as bewildered moderates set upon by a pack of crazed right-wingers.
A new spin will be needed now that the pack of irrational right-wingers includes Teddy Kennedy, Carol Moseley-Braun and the entire Senate.
During a debate on other legislation, Gorton introduced an amendment to pull the plug on funds for the history standards. That probably would have passed fairly easily in a closer vote. But several senators were queasy about pre-empting other concerned groups, including the nation’s governors, who have led the effort to set voluntary standards. So a “sense of the Senate” condemnation was voted on instead and passed without dissent. Even the one “no” vote, by J. Bennett Johnston, D-La., was a “yes” in disguise. He wanted stronger action than simple condemnation.
How do you get all hundred senators to repudiate your standards? Easy. Just do it the way the major perpetrators, historians Gary Nash and Charlotte Crabtree, did it at UCLA’s National Center for History in the Schools. Start the standards with the familiar “convergence” gambit: America is not a Western-based nation, but the result of three cultures (Indian, black and European) “converging.” This subliminally puts the Founding Fathers, and whites in general, in their place as mere founders of a third of a nation.
Though two of these three founding cultures were preliterate, depict all three as equal in value and importance, except for the fact that European culture was worse and dedicated largely to oppression, injustice, gender bias and rape of the natural world.
Carry this theme through, trampling moderate opinion to the point where Albert Shanker of the American Federation of Teachers says: “No other nation in the world teaches a national history that leaves its children feeling negative about their own country - this would be the first.”
Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., said we don’t need “sanitized history,” but don’t need to give our children “a warped and negative view” of America and the West, either.
How did these standards get to be so bad? After all, historians and teachers of all political persuasions took part in the discussions. But most of the power stayed in the hands of academics with a heavy ideological agenda.
Earl Bell, head of the Organization of History Teachers, and one of four K-through-12 teachers on the panel, felt run over by the ideological academics. He hates the view of the Cold War in the standards - as a clash that wasn’t really about anything, just a quarrel, as he said, between “equally imperialistic nations.” The companion World History Standards, he says, are even worse, “unrelentingly anti-Western.”
The fiasco over the American and Western history standards is a reflection of what has happened to the world of academic history. The profession, and the American Historical Association, are now dominated by younger historians with a familiar agenda: Take the West down a peg, romanticize “the Other” (non-whites), treat all cultures as equal, refrain from criticizing non-white cultures.
The romanticizing of “the Other” is most clearly seen in the current attempt to portray American Indian cultures as unremittingly noble, mystical, gender-fair, peace-loving and living in great harmony with nature. All the evidence that doesn’t fit is more or less ignored. The premise of the exercise makes it profoundly dishonest and propagandistic.
In the World History Standards, slavery is only mentioned twice, and both times as practices of white cultures: in ancient Greece and in the Atlantic slave trade. The long and welldocumented slave trade around the world, including Muslim and black slave traders, is not mentioned. It doesn’t fit the agenda.
History textbooks, curriculums and museum displays are becoming the carriers of the broad assault against American and Western culture. The same kinds of gratuitous touches that turned up in the Enola Gay text (e.g., Japanese brave and noble, Americans racist and destructive) show up in other Smithsonian exhibits now, and in the proposed history standards too.
Don’t be fooled by the argument that these standards are voluntary and non-binding, so not much is at stake. More than 10,000 copies have already been distributed, and textbook publishers are poised to make them the basis of new texts. Any approval of the standards by a public body would give them more momentum. They are beyond salvage and need to be junked.
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