imposing personalities on their title pages, the books’ final chapters seem
especially devoid of a point of view. I suspect this is because no one writes
them—at least no one hired to have a point of view. Chapter 12 tells how
publishers often farm out history textbooks, especially after their first editions,
to be written by underlings. Many of these clerks and freelance writers are not
qualified to have a point of view—some have no background in history at all,
not even a BA. Nor can they afford the time, as I could while writing this
chapter, to review the literature and develop a sense of its most cogent
positions. They are hired simply to summarize what happened in the recent
past, and summarize they do. The product that results has even less style and is
even more boring than the rest of these ponderous volumes. No wonder
teachers skip the last chapters!
Nevertheless, the notion that history courses should slight the sasha for the
distant zamani is perverse. Giving short shrift to the sasha, the way most
textbooks do, or avoiding the recent past altogether, the way most teachers do,
does not meet students’ needs. Authors may work on the assumption that
covering recent events thoroughly is unnecessary because students already
know about them. Since textbook authors tend to be old, however, what is
sasha for them is zamani to their students. Students need information about the
recent past to understand ongoing developments. Yet high school juniors have
almost no personal memory of the Clinton administration, to say nothing of
anything earlier, like the women’s movement. Soon the disputed Florida
election results of 2000, so recent to many of us, will be ancient history to high
school students. Moreover, when textbooks and teachers downplay the sasha,
they make it hard for students to draw connections between the study of the
past and the issues they are sure to face in the future, which can only encourage
students to consider all history irrelevant.
“The past is never dead,” wrote William Faulkner. “It’s not even past.”
Unquestionably this is truest about the sasha. The sasha is perhaps our most
important past, because it is not dead but living-dead. Its theft by textbooks and
teachers is the most wicked crime schools perpetrate on high school students,
depriving them of perspective about the issues that most affect them. The semi-
remembered factoids students carry with them about the Battle of Put-in-Bay or
Silent Cal Coolidge do little to help them understand the world into which they
move at graduation. That world is still working out sex roles. That world faces