Revisionism in School Textbooks

It turns out that Japanese nationalists have no monopoly on rewriting history for political purposes. It even happens closer to home. A friend who lives in one of the tony Virginia suburbs of Washington writes:

My kids' elementary school textbooks all skipped the Civil War. To gain Virginia school board approval, they went straight from the 49ers to the cowboys.

My junior high schooler's text is even more interesting. It covers the secession and details Confederate victories up to Fredericksburg. It then skips to Reconstruction. Not a word about Vicksburg, Gettysburg, Chattanooga, Atlanta, or the Wilderness. No explanation of how Confederate victories connect to Union military occupation. If the chapters weren't numbered, I'd think one was missing.

There's a case to be made for teaching children, especially young children, a version of history conducive to patriotic feeling, and letting them fill in some of the darker chapters later. That's not just a nationalist idea; thinking that America and Americans generally do the right thing is one way of coming to the conclusion that doing the wrong thing — committing and abetting torture, for example — is un-American.

The Howard Zinn version of American history -- going from genocidal colonization to slave trading and then to oppressing the working class at home and supporting tyranny abroad — in addition to being no more accurate than the sweetness-and-light version, is as likely, if taught to schoolchildren, to make them cynical partakers in evil as it is to make them the revolutionaries Zinn would like to turn out. A little sugar-coating for patriotic purposes, especially in the early grades, seems to me fully justified, though I would draw a sharp line between omission and fabrication.

But distorting Civil War history in a pro-Confederate direction has no such justification. Catering to the Southern version of victim-identity politics is obviously bad for national unity. Why are the core red states so damned unpatriotic?

Article Author: Mark Kleiman

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