History, the Sequel

By John Elson

"Knowledge of history is the precondition of political intelligence. Without history, a society shares no common memory of where it has been ((or)) what its core values are."

So, laudably, write the authors of National Standards for United States History, a federally funded curriculum guide that was issued last week with impressive auspices -- and amid swirling controversy. The 271-page document outlines what students in three grade groupings (five to six, seven to eight, nine to 12) should know about the American past. The guide compartmentalizes U.S. history into 10 eras, from the beginnings until 1620 to contemporary $ America, and proposes two to four "standards" of what students should know about each period. National Standards will be submitted to an independent board for approval. The proceedings are all part of congressional legislation that set up Goals 2000, a program designed to ensure that students advancing to higher grades will have shown competence in certain subjects, including history.

This ambitious guide was released by the National Center for History in the Schools at UCLA and has the backing of such prestigious organizations as the American Federation of Teachers, the National Council for the Social Studies and the National Education Association. The National Endowment for the Humanities and the U.S. Department of Education provided a $1.75 million grant in 1992 that got the work under way.

But how well was that seed money spent? Poorly, says Lynne Cheney, who headed the NEH when the grant was approved. She is the most prominent of conservative critics who charge that National Standards offers what Cheney calls "a warped view of American history" and that its criteria for including or excluding landmark events and persons are "politically correct to a fare-thee-well." For example, Harriet Tubman, the African American who helped organize the pre-Civil War underground railroad, is cited six times in the guide, whereas Lincoln's Gettysburg Address is mentioned only once in passing. Students are expected to know about the 1848 Seneca Falls, New York, convention on women's rights (mentioned nine times) but not about the uncited Wright brothers or Thomas Alva Edison, whose inventions transformed the lives of millions. McCarthyism dominates the National Standards precis of the cold war.

Charlotte Crabtree, an emeritus professor of education at UCLA and co- director of the National Standards project, answers that Cheney's by-the- numbers critique shows "a lack of understanding of what the standards are about." One aim of the guidelines is to promote "inclusive history" by acknowledging the achievements of Americans -- blacks, Native Americans and women, notably -- who were ignored or marginalized in textbooks of the past. Another goal was to "get away from memorizing mind-numbing names of people, which history students just hate."

Eric Foner, a professor of history at Columbia University who has closely watched the evolution of National Standards, says, "Pressure groups from the right demand a political correctness of their own, but somehow the name p.c. is never applied to them. When veterans' groups demand and succeed in changing an exhibition, nobody cries p.c. They say these guys are reacting against revisionism."

One problem, however, is that National Standards is so insistent on resurrecting neglected voices that it becomes guilty of what might be called disproportionate revisionism. In a chapter on the American Revolution, for example, the guide recommends that students examine the lives of individuals who were "in the forefront of the struggle for independence." Samuel Adams and Thomas Paine are plausible candidates here. But is it unreasonable to suspect that the writer Mercy Otis Warren is mentioned in the same breath mainly because she was a woman?

Crabtree and her colleagues note that earlier drafts of National Standards were subjected to peer review by hundreds of scholars and teachers as well as by focus groups that included members of the American Historical Association. According to one member of the policy-setting group, historian Elizabeth Fox- Genovese of Emory University, some of these meetings became academic combat zones. The project was "tremendously politicized by the professional associations," she says. In general, historians sought to de-emphasize political history while teachers were more sympathetic about keeping it. "Probably the biggest battle is between history and social studies. The social studies teachers ((who oppose any history requirements in lower grades)) are a huge lobby."

On Nov. 9, UCLA will issue a parallel guide to teaching world history. Disagreements over how to treat Western European civilization in relation to other cultures are said to have been particularly intense. In short, the conflict over National Standards may be only the first round in a long, bitter intellectual skirmish.

With reporting by Ratu Kamlani/New York