Offblogging again. Moira, that is. With comments like this:

As my daughter describes it, every year in her school career, from the time history was taught as a separate subject (3rd or 4th grade, I think), the teacher began the year by telling the students that he or she is not going to teach that rah-rah, Great Man, patriotic booshwa which the teacher is sure is all they've ever heard. But they never, as a matter of fact, and have never, gotten anything but the Howard Zinn version. This is in two different states, leaving my daughter to wonder where this fabled Fatherland indoctrination is going on. As she summarizes the view of American history she'd have if she had no independent reading life: "American Revolution. Genocide of natives. Slavery. Civil War. Jim Crow. Susan B. Anthony. Jim Crow, Jim Crow, Jim Crow, Jim Crow, Jim Crow, Jim Crow, Jim Crow. Civil Rights." (Actually, since she got into high-school and the advanced history classes it's not quite that bad, and a lot more rigorous, systematic, and even-handed. They now use several textbooks only one of which is by Howard Zinn. But the teachers still seem to think they're rockin' the students' smug bourgeois world, man.)

When discussing "teaching history" people often talk as if they believed that children show up for 3rd grade with the cognitive development and critical skills proper to young adults. I would argue that "heroic history" is exactly the type of history that is appropriate for young minds - it serves the purpose of capturing their imaginations and stuffing their brains with facts while they're not looking.

I absorbed an enormous amount of "romantic" history when young which had the effect of whetting my appetite for reading more, and more "serious" history. For example, Moorehead's compelling and beautifully written Nile books "fired my imagination", as per the cliché, and led me to read every book I could get my hands on about African history and colonialism. And yet there are people who are horrifed at the notion of putting Moorehead's books, once bestsellers, into the hands of innocent children. Not because they are inaccurate, but because they are "racist" - i.e., they are the stories of extraordinary white men, and if a child is ever once exposed to a Euro-centric history, I suppose he can't ever read another book with a different focus.

Romantic and picaresque literature, even the pulpiest ripping yarn, can have the same salutary effect. (This reminds me that I ought to get my daughter to read more of the Flashman series. Not only are they funny as hell, but a young person would effortlessly absorb an enormous amount of factual information about the Victorian Age while reading them - leading on to broader reading, as similar books did for me. And reading them would also be much more likely to plant the seed of healthy skepticism toward heroes and authority, than all the PC lecturing in the world.) The pious conviction that exposing children to heroic history will turn them into mindless drones, and is opposed or damaging to the ability to advance to a more complex and critical understanding of history, is flatly false.

Interestingly, the same persons who insist that white boys must be shielded from romantic history, and instead given a historical education exclusively critical and demoralizing, lest they be rendered murderous jingo zombies, enthusiastically promote cramped and distorted "heroic histories" for women and minorities, as necessary for their healthy emotional and intellectual development.

Posted by David Fleck at 26 August 2009 08:23 PM