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Blunderov
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Florida’s Fear of History: New Law Undermines Critical Thinking
« on: 2006-08-02 15:11:10 » |
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Perhaps students could be provided with a guide to the thoughts of Chairman Jeb to accompany their history textbooks? These are complicated times and one doesn't wish to appear either revisionist or lacking in Party zeal.
http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=12705
Florida’s Fear of History: New Law Undermines Critical Thinking
by Robert Jensen
One way to measure the fears of people in power is by the intensity of their quest for certainty and control over knowledge.
By that standard, the members of the Florida Legislature marked themselves as the folks most terrified of history in the United States when last month they took bold action to become the first state to outlaw historical interpretation in public schools. In other words, Florida has officially replaced the study of history with the imposition of dogma and effectively outlawed critical thinking.
Although U.S. students are typically taught a sanitized version of history in which the inherent superiority and benevolence of the United States is rarely challenged, the social and political changes unleashed in the 1960s have opened up some space for a more honest accounting of our past. But even these few small steps taken by some teachers toward collective critical self-reflection are too much for many Americans to bear.
So, as part of an education bill signed into law by Gov. Jeb Bush, Florida has declared that “American history shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed.” That factual history, the law states, shall be viewed as “knowable, teachable, and testable.”
Florida’s lawmakers are not only prescribing a specific view of US history that must be taught (my favorite among the specific commands in the law is the one about instructing students on “the nature and importance of free enterprise to the United States economy”), but are trying to legislate out of existence any ideas to the contrary. They are not just saying that their history is the best history, but that it is beyond interpretation. In fact, the law attempts to suppress discussion of the very idea that history is interpretation.
The fundamental fallacy of the law is in the underlying assumption that “factual” and “constructed” are mutually exclusive in the study of history. There certainly are many facts about history that are widely, and sometimes even unanimously, agreed upon. But how we arrange those facts into a narrative to describe and explain history is clearly a construction, an interpretation. That’s the task of historians -- to assess factual assertions about the past, weave them together in a coherent narrative, and construct an explanation of how and why things happened.
For example, it’s a fact that Europeans began coming in significant numbers to North America in the 17th century. Were they peaceful settlers or aggressive invaders? That’s interpretation, a construction of the facts into a narrative with an argument for one particular way to understand those facts.
It’s also a fact that once those Europeans came, the indigenous people died in large numbers. Was that an act of genocide? Whatever one’s answer, it will be an interpretation, a construction of the facts to support or reject that conclusion.
In contemporary history, has U.S. intervention in the Middle East been aimed at supporting democracy or controlling the region’s crucial energy resources? Would anyone in a free society want students to be taught that there is only one way to construct an answer to that question?
Speaking of contemporary history, what about the fact that before the 2000 presidential election, Florida’s Republican secretary of state removed 57,700 names from the voter rolls, supposedly because they were convicted felons and not eligible to vote. It’s a fact that at least 90 percent were not criminals -- but were African American. It’s a fact that black people vote overwhelmingly Democratic. What conclusion will historians construct from those facts about how and why that happened? http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=217&row=2
In other words, history is always constructed, no matter how much Florida’s elected representatives might resist the notion. The real question is: How effectively can one defend one’s construction? If Florida legislators felt the need to write a law to eliminate the possibility of that question even being asked, perhaps it says something about their faith in their own view and ability to defend it.
One of the bedrock claims of the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment -- two movements that, to date, have not been repealed by the Florida Legislature -- is that no interpretation or theory is beyond challenge. The evidence and logic on which all knowledge claims are based must be transparent, open to examination. We must be able to understand and critique the basis for any particular construction of knowledge, which requires that we understand how knowledge is constructed.
Except in Florida.
But as tempting as it is to ridicule, we should not spend too much time poking fun at this one state, because the law represents a yearning one can find across the United States. Americans look out at a wider world in which more and more people reject the idea of the United States as always right, always better, always moral. As the gap between how Americans see themselves and how the world sees us grows, the instinct for many is to eliminate intellectual challenges at home: “We can’t control what the rest of the world thinks, but we can make sure our kids aren’t exposed to such nonsense.”
The irony is that such a law is precisely what one would expect in a totalitarian society, where governments claim the right to declare certain things to be true, no matter what the debates over evidence and interpretation. The preferred adjective in the United States for this is “Stalinist,” a system to which U.S. policymakers were opposed during the Cold War. At least, that’s what I learned in history class.
People assume that these kinds of buffoonish actions are rooted in the arrogance and ignorance of Americans, and there certainly are excesses of both in the United States.
But the Florida law -- and the more widespread political mindset it reflects -- also has its roots in fear. A track record of relatively successful domination around the world seems to have produced in Americans a fear of any lessening of that dominance. Although U.S. military power is unparalleled in world history, we can’t completely dictate the shape of the world or the course of events. Rather than examining the complexity of the world and expanding the scope of one’s inquiry, the instinct of some is to narrow the inquiry and assert as much control as possible to avoid difficult and potentially painful challenges to orthodoxy.
Is history “knowable, teachable, and testable?" Certainly people can work hard to know -- to develop interpretations of processes and events in history and to understand competing interpretations. We can teach about those views. And students can be tested on their understanding of conflicting constructions of history.
But the real test is whether Americans can come to terms with not only the grand triumphs but also the profound failures of our history. At stake in that test is not just a grade in a class, but our collective future.
Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center http://thirdcoastactivist.org/. He is the author of "The Heart of Whiteness: Race, Racism, and White Privilege" and "Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity" (both from City Lights Books). Email to: rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0717-22.htm
By : Robert Jensen
July Monday 24th 2006
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Hermit
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Re:Florida’s Fear of History: New Law Undermines Critical Thinking
« Reply #1 on: 2006-08-02 21:28:06 » |
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[Robert Jensen] The irony is that such a law is precisely what one would expect in a totalitarian society, where governments claim the right to declare certain things to be true, no matter what the debates over evidence and interpretation.
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[Hermit] Does Robert Jensen imagine that the US is not a totalitarian society? Upon what evidence?
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[Robert Jensen] People assume that these kinds of buffoonish actions are rooted in the arrogance and ignorance of Americans, and there certainly are excesses of both in the United States. But the Florida law -- and the more widespread political mindset it reflects -- also has its roots in fear.
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[Hermit] But the greatest of these is ignorance. Usually wilful. The ignorance is, I think, a combination of lousy education, worse media, and an overall impervious layer of pernicious belief smeared over *everything*.
[Hermit] In the Midwest, I see this all the time. Brain damaged children are visible in abundance. Terrifying as this is no longer seen in Europe. Genetic testing has all but eliminated the more common genetic disasters in Europe. Here, "life is precious" - unless it belongs to somebody other than a WASP or it costs the state money. For example, I know some "nice", not totally stupid parents, both diabetic, who have bred repetitively - and were totally horrified when I explained to them why their large brood is entirely diabetic. They had - they asserted - never had it explained. An few minutes with a pile of carefully marked coins conveyed the basics of how their genes fucked their children. Then they explained how much they are looking forward to grandchildren and "hoped" that it didn't affect them. What can one say?
[Hermit] Today I had a wonderful old Iowa farmer spend ten minutes complaining about the heat and the drought, then explain to me that the US has plenty of oil, the problem is just "those environmentalists" that won't permit its extraction, then he tried to explain how Colorado shales and Canadian tar sands (both of which are energy transformation processes, both using more energy in extraction and processing than they yield, so both would dramatically worsen climate effects) can provide power for the USA for "hundreds of years" (if they had to replace oil and gas, neither would provide power for more than about 15 years at current recovery rates - but either would much more than double CO2 and Sulfur production). Now this is a much better educated than average citizen. He is a significant shareholder in a mutual power company - and owns the coal mine that it sits on. Unfortunately he thinks that his power company should be allowed to burn the high Sulfur coals he owns without needing to do anything other than burning it the way his father did. Instead the State is forcing him to import somewhat less toxic coal at high cost (and while we didn't discuss it, I'm sure that he would be horrified to learn that his coal (and the imported coal) is strongly radioactive, and that it kills at least hundreds of people each year). He does however look forward to the future, as he thinks that these "stupid" rules will be overturned after the next elections - and definitely after Bush appoints another judge. Oh, and they do plan to build another coal fired station right after they ban abortion.
[Hermit] Rant over, back on topic, James Loewen who did a good job of waking me up to reality with his excellent, "Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Textbook Got Wrong", states in essence that school history is worse than completely worthless - and that for complex reasons, it is impossible to fix this. From his website (supra)
Quote:| A sociologist who spent two years at the Smithsonian surveying twelve leading high school textbooks of American history only to find an embarrassing blend of bland optimism, blind nationalism, and plain misinformation, weighing in at an average of 888 pages and almost five pounds. A best-selling author who wrote Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Textbook Got Wrong and Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong. A researcher who discovered that many, and in many states most communities were "Sundown Towns" that kept out blacks (and sometimes other groups) for decades. (Some still do.) An educator who attended Carleton College, holds the Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University, and taught race relations for twenty years at the University of Vermont. |
[Hermit] Fun, fun, fun.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Blunderov
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Re:Florida’s Fear of History: New Law Undermines Critical Thinking
« Reply #2 on: 2006-08-03 03:30:42 » |
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Quote from: Hermit on 2006-08-02 21:28:06
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[Robert Jensen] The irony is that such a law is precisely what one would expect in a totalitarian society, where governments claim the right to declare certain things to be true, no matter what the debates over evidence and interpretation.
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[Hermit] Does Robert Jensen imagine that the US is not a totalitarian society? Upon what evidence?
[Blunderov] From what I can tell the situation in the States is hauntingly similar to that of the RSA in the days of Apartheid. At the dark heart of that matter too, was fear. This lead to the mindset that circumstances were so exceptional that they warranted exceptions. Which in turn lead to Byzantine manouvering in order to kludge together a system of exceptions and then to avoid the resulting contradictions when they couldn't be ignored altogether. Variations on the theme of "The rest of the world doesn't live here and they don't understand the threat that we face" became the order of the day. We see this in Palestine too - then and now.
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[Robert Jensen] People assume that these kinds of buffoonish actions are rooted in the arrogance and ignorance of Americans, and there certainly are excesses of both in the United States. But the Florida law -- and the more widespread political mindset it reflects -- also has its roots in fear.
...
[Hermit] But the greatest of these is ignorance. Usually wilful. The ignorance is, I think, a combination of lousy education, worse media, and an overall impervious layer of pernicious belief smeared over *everything*.
[Blunderov] Here in the RSA for instance, no English speaking teacher was permitted to take History as a major at any state Normal College. This was because the History textbooks of our time were a blatant Christian Nationalist system of lies and evasions and it was deemed sensible to keep English speaking possible "intellectuals" as far away as possible from them.
[Hermit] Fun, fun, fun.
[Blunderov] Yup. The beat goes on.
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