tradition of resilience and resourcefulness to draw on.” Many students are not
so easily reassured. According to a 1993 survey, children are much more
concerned about the environment than are their parents.^59 In the late 1980s
about one high school senior in three thought that nuclear or biological
annihilation will probably be the fate of all mankind within their lifetimes.^60 “I
have talked with my friends about this,” a student of mine wrote in her class
journal. “We all agree that we feel as if we are not going to finish our adult
lives.” A survey of high school seniors in 1999 found that almost half believed
the “best years of the United States were behind us.”^61 These students had all
taken American history courses, but the textbooks’ regimen of positive thinking
does not seem to have rubbed off on them. Students know when they are being
conned. They sense that underneath the mindless optimism is a defensiveness
that rings hollow. Or maybe they simply never reached the cheerful endings of
their textbooks.
Probably the principal effect of the textbook whitewash of environmental
issues in favor of the idea of progress is to persuade high school students that
American history courses are not appropriate places to bring up the future
course of American history.^62 What is perhaps the key issue of the day will
have to be discussed in other classes—maybe science or health—even though
it is foremost a social rather than biological or health issue. Meanwhile, back
in history class, there are more bland, data-free assurances that things are
getting better.
E. J. Mishan has suggested that feeding students rosy tales of automatic
progress helps keep them passive, for it presents the future as a process over
which they have no control.^63 I don’t believe this is why textbooks end as they
do, however. Their upbeat endings may best be understood as ploys by
publishers who hope that nationalist optimism will get their books adopted.
Moreover, they know that Republicans have descended from the party of Nixon
—when they passed the Environmental Protection Act—to the party of George
W. Bush, where big business, especially oil, directs our environmental and
energy policies. In today’s political climate publishers may worry that to
suggest that global warming or energy shortages are real threats may be taken
as partisan Democratic history. Hence, they may lose adoptions.
Such happy endings in our history books really amount to concessions of