Without the American Dream
ILLICK, JOSEPH E.
Without the American Dream_ America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century By Frances FitzGerald Little, Brown. 240 pp. $9.95. Reviewed by Joseph E. Mick Professor of...
...Then came the politically focused, compulsively organized, tersely written texts of the 1890s, just about coincident with the emergence of history as an academic profession and with the recognition that the rapid expansion of the public schools provided a market for the books...
...Furthermore, the New Social Studies movement encountered continuing hostility from the old secondary school establishment and was simply ignored by young reformers who viewed the basic problem in American education not as one of curriculum but rather heartlessness and elitism in the classroom...
...Second, we differentiate children from adults, making it easy "to proceed to the proposition that the aim of teaching is to obtain as much control over children as possible...
...But despite that witty dismissal, the progression sounds rather like life itself...
...There are three reasons for this, FitzGerald feels...
...Presumably, dead individuals may clash, but surviving regional, racial or social groups may not...
...They tend to stress the "problems" of American society...
...It makes a weighty subject comprehensible, and its breadth is impressive...
...Disciples of John Dewey, some of them concentrated on nonauthori-tarian teaching methods and others on mass education...
...In the early years of the 20th century the Progressive movement in politics produced its counterpart in historians concerned with social and economic issues...
...They are captives of larger, impersonal forces: the free enterprise system...
...There were good guys and bad guys who occupied unique places in the past...
...These people wrested control of the National Education Association (NEA) from university and private academy intellectuals in the early part of the century and held onto it until the early '60s...
...They emphasize such concepts as "culture" rather than success...
...Sputnik prompted a reaction against the education establishment and an openness to reform...
...The gift of the NEA leadership to the teaching of American history was "cultural narrowness...
...America Revised is written in an engaging style and tone...
...The messages that children must receive," writes FitzGerald, "are thus rather confusing: love everyone in the elementary grades, fight Communism in junior high, and face endless intractable problems in high school...
...Indeed, says Frances FitzGerald in America Revised, they have reflected too much: American history is being rewritten to suit the latest political, ideological or cultural fashion...
...The resolution of this dilemma has been to talk of "problems," such as poverty or racial discrimination, while explaining their origins through a "natural-disaster theory of history" that ducks the matter of responsibility...
...These men were intent on promoting reform by preaching social democratic virtues yet perplexed by the newly-discovered problem of assimilating "the immigrants," seen as distinct from "the Americans...
...they lacked thematic structure save for the authors' nationalistic message...
...That view changed radically in the '60s and continues to change today...
...the battle between social change and entrenched conservatism...
...This meant seeing history from the bottom up and giving voice to the inarticulate...
...Then, as real-life people disappeared from the story, there arose the difficulty of keeping history interesting but free of conflict...
...the competition from TV, magazines and other components of mass culture...
...Instead of beginning with Christopher Columbus, moving to Captain John Smith, then to Daniel Boone, etc.—a succession of European male heroes—some contemporary texts open with a black cowboy or a Mexican-American Congressman...
...They are merely tacked on, leaving the book without a conclusion...
...Then I moved on to teaching and discovered, with the help of my New Left colleagues, that the recent writing of American history had been beset by concensus, and that anyone of a faintly radical persuasion must focus on the diversity of American life...
...The net result of all this has been confusion for students, who are denied a solid rock of the past to stand on in the troubled waters of the present...
...The United States was a melting pot, we were told, in which everyone could look forward to a prosperous, homogeneous future...
...Nevertheless, for all these alterations in viewpoint, the theme of a homogeneous, virtuous America continued...
...Early in the century, moralizing appeared through the agency of character...
...By the 1930s the melting pot seemed to be simmering pretty well, although blacks had still not made it into texts, and Indians, so prominent in the 19th century, were disappearing from them...
...FitzGerald herself stands above the battles she describes, wryly amused, disengaged...
...The radical break came in the '60s, and the Vietnam War shifted the focus of schoolbooks to violence, racial strife and imperialism...
...Meanwhile, from the outside there came a Right-wing reaction against reform, as religious fundamentalists, social conservatives and academic purists (the Back to Basics people) launched an effective campaign...
...As I moved through black history, women's history and ethnic history my thoughts slowly returned to my young years and the public schools where I had first come in contact with the past: in a village classroom crowded with farm children, all Protestant yet separated from mainstream America by the insularity of their German culture and language, taught by a college-educated spinster who was determined to impose order on and enlighten us casual country bumpkins...
...But she ultimately concedes that they are neither heroes nor villains (thereby taking care of that approach to history...
...For all their differences, these various groups share one important characteristic: They have all been intellectually reductive...
...The patriotic 19th century witnessed schoolbooks that were chronologies of events, mainly military...
...Secondary schools, apparently, are beneath their consideration except as sources of income...
...FitzGerald shows the shocking indifference of historians to textbooks appearing under their names...
...If publishers are absolved, how about authors...
...In the 1940s, textbooks showed a new concern with foreign affairs, but soon the fears of international Communism invaded the texts with a pessimistic Cold War message...
...To us as children, these texts were the truths of things: They were American history...
...it is the work of people whose profession it is to think about the content of American education—school administrators, professors at teachers' colleges, curriculum-development experts, schoolteachers, and bureaucrats in Federal and state offices of education...
...Whether those '50s school-books provided certainties for all children, though—including those like myself, who felt alienated from the mainstream—is a question open to debate...
...Textbooks have reflected the shift in our sense of identity...
...Its astute observations are not revealing insights...
...FitzGerald tells us that "textbook philosophy is a conscious creation...
...and in a polyglot urban high school, 10 miles away, where the sons and daughters of steel-workers read textbooks that expounded the "standard" American history...
...When I reached graduate school I found that everyone rewrote history, and that the study of this process had gained the respectability of a title: historiography...
...But it lacks analytical depth...
...This dramatic transformation, however, has been evident only in secondary school texts...
...Still, FitzGerald sees historians, like publishers, as victims of larger social forces...
...For her part, the author is nostalgic: "Those of us who grew up in the fifties believed in the permanence of our American history textbooks...
...Finally, American parents expect schools to accomplish not only the education of children for higher status, but also the resolution of social issues that adults themselves cannot handle...
...it has not percolated down to the lower grades...
...Regrettably, this group, like its predecessor, was unable to develop the broad cultural outlook implicit in its approach...
...First, we have a limited understanding of how to teach, rendering useless the efforts to make the art or craft of teaching into a science...
...FitzGerald does not immediately identify the author of this notion, and we are tempted to believe that it, too, has come about "naturally...
...Reviewed by Joseph E. Mick Professor of History, San Francisco State University Growing up during the Cold War, I learned that the Soviets rewrote history to the specifications of their political regime...
...Of course, the remembered certainties of childhood can be reassuring in our adult lives...
...At first it appears that the author holds the publishers responsible for the new textbooks...
...Although 1 think FitzGerald's first and third explanations are essentially correct, and the second wrong-headed, none of them is seriously examined or argued in the body of the book...
...Fortunately, there is a third and more villainous group waiting in the wings...
...Beyond debate is FitzGerald's contention that texts are humorless and often insubstantial works that tend to substitute editorial moralizing for penetrating thought...
...After all, we already know that neither publishers nor historians are responsible for it...
...but both camps concurred in their hostility to academic discipline and intellectual training...
...The result was the New Social Studies movement, a label applied to those educators who believed students should be provided with primary sources from the past, rather than contemporary interpretive texts, and made to develop analytical skills by writing their own histories...
Vol. 62 • December 1979 • No. 25
