This is resistance raised to a high level. Students are simply not learning even
those details of American history that educated citizens should know. Still less
do they learn what caused the major developments in our past. Therefore, they
cannot apply lessons from the past to current issues.
Unfortunately, students are left with no resources to understand, accept, or
rebut historical referents used in arguments by candidates for office, sociology
professors, or newspaper journalists. If knowledge is power, ignorance cannot
be bliss.
Emotion is the glue that causes history to stick. We remember where we
were when we heard of the attack on the World Trade Center because it
affected us emotionally. American history is a heartrending subject. When
students read real voices from our past, the emotions do not fail to move them.
Recall Las Casas’s passionate denunciations of the Spanish treatment of
Indians: “What we committed in the Indies stands out among the most
unpardonable offenses ever committed against God and mankind.” Consider
the famous final words of William Jennings Bryan to the 1896 Democratic
national convention: “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this
crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” Or
Helen Keller’s attack on the Brooklyn Eagle: “Socially blind and deaf, it
defends an intolerable system.” Or Franklin D. Roosevelt’s words in the
depression, assuring us we had “nothing to fear but fear itself.” Events and
images also call forth strong feelings. The saga of Elizabeth Blackwell in
medical school, the liberation of Nazi death camp inmates by American (and
Russian and British) soldiers, the ultimate success of Jonas Salk in finding a
vaccine that would kill polio—these are stirring stories. As textbook critic
Mrs. W. K. Haralson writes, “There is no way the glowing, throbbing events of
history can be presented fairly, accurately, and factually without involving
emotion.”^9
Earlier chapters have shown, however, that American history textbooks and
courses are neither dispassionate nor passionate. All textbook authors and
many teachers seem not to have thought deeply about just what in our past
might be worthy of passion or even serious contemplation. No real emotion
seeps into these books, not even real pride.^10 Instead, heroic exceptions to the
contrary, most American history courses and textbooks operate in a gray
emotional landscape of pious duty in which the United States has a good
history, so studying it is good for students. “They don’t think of history as