A Work In Progress

Take a minute and think back to high school. Walk through the lobby, down the hall, past your locker and turn into your old US History classroom. Weed out the window shade maps, the posters, overhead projector, and blackboard. Don’t think about what you learned in the class, but how you learned in class. Do you remember the textbook that you used? Do you remember using anything else to get your information? History textbooks have been an important issue in the news this past week due to a recent vote by The Texas Department of Education. The vote was made as one of many to further the to change state curriculum guidelines. The final vote will be held in May. Texas is one of the biggest textbook buyers in the country and counts as one of the nation’s 21 adoption states. This means that school districts can only use state money to buy textbooks that are state approved. Adoption states hinder the textbook writing process and motivate publishers to cater to the standards of adoption states.
A common complaint among teachers in schools all over the country is that their history books are more so biased than informative. When a history teacher plans his or her curriculum they have two options; teach completely from the book or teach using the book as one of many sources. Teaching using a textbook as the only source is an acceptable form of teaching in today’s education system. This might have been the way that you learned history as a student. The problem with only having a textbook as an informant is that the student only hears what they read. Textbooks are written for students to get the facts, but not all of them. Writers scribe together a narrative of the nation’s past, but not all of it. Teachers have a limited amount of time to cover information and textbook writers cater to this lack of time by cutting out historic happenings. It is important to look at what is being cut out. A teacher from Oklahoma called into National Public Radio last week in an effort to put in her 2 cents on history textbooks. She complained of the history book used by her school lacking information on Native American culture and history. She claimed that there was“ No mention of who lived here before, no mention who was kicked off.” If students are growing up learning from one source than they are growing up with a learning mindset that forgets to question or at least think critically.
Tim Tyson, author of the memoir “Blood Done Sign My Name” writes about the misconceptions in history that report the struggle of African Americans and their quest for civil rights. Tyson states in his book that
“The problem is not that we cherish the story, exactly, nor is the story itself entirely false... many of the things we admire about Dr. King are factual. The problem is why we cherish that kind of story: because we want to transcend our history without actually confronting it...The self congratulatory popular account insists that Dr. King called on the nation to fully accept its own creed, and the walls came a-tumbling down. This conventional narrative is soothing, moving, and politically acceptable, and has only the disadvantage of bearing no resemblance to what actually happened,”

This is the problem teachers face when they simply rely on their textbook; lack of confrontation in regards for the material. Students look at the text with a sense of trust. The past has been written neatly for them in paragraph form with organized headers. They read the bold print words and take those as glossary terms they should know. The problem is that even the definition of those bold print terms can be biased or vague. For example the textbook definition of “The Middle Passage” is usually described as the simple route used for slave trade across the Atlantic. Students don’t get an understanding of the brutality that accompanied this “journey” for African slaves. Teachers find it safe and easy to fall back on teaching a curriculum that fits a timeframe, but it is more important for students to at least learn that the book used is one of many sources. Teachers could help students get a better understand of the Middle Passage through providing secondary sources such as diary excerpts from slaves where details transcend a boat crossing the Atlantic.
Professor Jonathan Zimmerman, from the History and Education Department at New York University was interviewed on NPR’s program on textbooks last week. Zimmerman hits the issue of history textbooks spot on when bringing up the underlying problem in History classrooms.
“...I think that one of the things that really frustrates me as a historian is that our kids aren't exposed to what historians actually do. We are not perfect encapsulators of the past because we didn't live in the past. What we do, through the best of our ability, is to try to reconstruct the past, but we do that imperfectly. And most of all, we disagree with each other in the process of doing it. That's what I find so exciting about history - is that it's a series of question marks.”

Most teachers would likely agree with Zimmerman, but most would also complain that there is simply too much of a risk in implementing this idea in the classroom. There are standards and deadlines to be met. Teachers can’t afford to take the time to sit students down and have them analyze and question everything in the text; the school year is simply too short. Learning the facts and controversies of the nation’s past should be the key responsibility for teachers to cover in the classroom. This will not be possible until textbooks are created in a way where students learn to critically think within the text. Until then teachers will find themselves morally challenged between teaching simply through one point of view or the challenge of many.