How Textbooks Can Teach Different Versions Of History
... Eleventh-grade U.S. history teacher Samantha Manchac is concerned about the new materials and is already drawing up her lesson plans for the coming year. She teaches at The High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, a public school in Houston.The first lesson she says she'll give her kids is how textbooks can tell different versions of history. "We are going to utilize these textbooks to some extent, but I also want you to be critical of the textbooks and not take this as the be-all and end-all of American history," she imagines telling her new students.
She doesn't want to rely solely on the brand-new texts because she says the guidelines for the books downplay some issues — like slavery — and skirt others — like Jim Crow laws.
She says it's "definitely an attempt in many instances to whitewash our history, as opposed to exposing students to the reality of things and letting them make decisions for themselves" ...
http://tpr.org/post/how-textbooks-can-teach-different-versions-history
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That's the problem. Your version of history, my version of history, their version of history is all about the facts. The facts we choose to present.
To make a fact interesting, you have to problematize it. It has to be part of something that answers a question. Facts without a narrative is a laundry list, and a narrative will be built, a way of understanding the facts, a way of making that understanding solve a question or problem.
You pick one set of facts, and the Civil War is all about slavery. You pick another set of facts, and slavery is but a token issue in the struggle of the South not to be subject to Northern business interests by means of Federal control, with slavery being the rallying cry around which the business interests managed to gain control, to section the country into their portion and the other portion until total commercial and business control can be gained. Paranoid much? Possibly. Pick your facts and it seems reasonable. Or insane. Do you look at the history starting in the late 1850s, with slavery; or do you view that a continuation of the tariff struggles that began and were largely settled in court in the '40s, but which left many in the North displeased?
History is always rewritten to fit a political agenda. The 1950s and '60s and '70s was replete with the rewriting of history to fit a political agenda. The first history was to show how great the US was; the rewriting was to show how vile the US was. Another revision was to accentuate the role of Xianity; a backlash was to remove Xianity and show that Xianity played no role. The importance of the Great Awakening I and II waned and waxed over time, over a century after the GA II was long over.
I watched one (college) class in which the teacher had taught how oppressive the US military was to women and people of color. Then I watched a young man, whose father was 2nd or 3rd generation military, bring in and play audio recordings of WACS that he had, as part of his project, contacted, visited, and interviewed. The teacher was shamed by the pride in their voices and that the women who she had said were oppressed and humiliated were ecstatic at being given their role to play and helping open the military to women. She forced him to shut off the recording and, red faced from and shaking with anger, called them old, senile, stupid, misguided, and brainwashed--dehumanizing the women she had attempted to be the defender of. She had her history; it wasn't false. It had an agenda. She had picked facts and built a narrative. They had their history; neither was it false. I think theirs was less political, but it still had an agenda. The women interviewed would have accepted the professor's facts; not the full narrative. The professor had to not only try to destroy the women's narrative, but discount their facts and try to destroy the prestige they had as actual participants by destroying their credibility. Her narrative had no room for their facts. The professor's narrative is the dominant one in academia.
"What is truth?"
In any event, the problem with the teacher in the OP is that she is an individual teacher and while she has academic freedom in her classroom, she also has to teach to the EOC. That means while she may want to teach certain things, in Texas the essential standards, the necessary content, gets broken into two unequal parts: readiness (or required) standards and supporting standards. Mastery of the readiness standards gets her students nearly to passing the EOC test; they're perhaps 35-40% of the essential standards. The rest of the essential standards, the other 60% or so, make up perhaps 35% of the test. She can add stuff, to be sure; but that won't be on the test, which is closely, anal-retentively, aligned with the essential standards and the readiness/supporting standards breakdown. (Even worse, it's on a 1-2-1 model, 1 question at entry level, for confidence; 2 at target level, for testing ability and learning; 1 question above target level, to challenge those who have mastered the essential stuff beyond the basic level.)
Those essential standards and which are readiness/supporting are to be found at
http://tea.texas.gov/WorkArea/linkit.aspx?LinkIdentifier=id&ItemID=2147488322&libID=2147488321.
For example, and I quote (section 9 from the link a few lines up):
trace the historical development of the civil rights movement in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, including the 13th, 14th, 15th, and 19th amendments; Readiness Standard
describe the roles of political organizations that promoted civil rights, including ones from African American, Chicano, American Indian, women’s, and other civil rights movements; Supporting Standard
identify the roles of significant leaders who supported various rights movements, including Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez, Rosa Parks, Hector P. Garcia, and Betty Friedan; Supporting Standard
compare and contrast the approach taken by some civil rights groups such as the Black Panthers with the nonviolent approach of Martin Luther King Jr.; Supporting Standard
discuss the impact of the writings of Martin Luther King Jr. such as his “I Have a Dream” speech and “Letter from Birmingham Jail” on the civil rights movement; Supporting Standard
A quick glance at the TEKS suggests that it's really US history from 1877 to the present, with some background here and therefore before 1877.
Then again, this school is a magnet school and its EOC scores are good (well, their AA and Latino students suck at math, but that only dinged their rates; and AA students could use some help in US history; still, the school itself still "met standards"
. School report card is at http://www.houstonisd.org/cms/lib2/TX01001591/Centricity/Domain/23891/hspva20132014reportcard.pdf .
