razor-sharp swords. They even cut off the hand of one of their
victims.Telling of skulls split open and providing minutiae like the heft and sharpness
of the swords prompt us to feel revulsion toward Brown. Certainly the author
does not provide these details to shield students from unpleasantries.
If textbooks are going to include severed hands, those of the Arawaks cut off
by Columbus are much more historically significant. Columbus’s severings
were systematic and helped depopulate Haiti. American History, having
omitted these atrocities, cannot claim to present Pottawatomie evenhandedly.
Violence aside, what about shielding children from other untoward realities
of our society? How should social studies classes teach young people about
the police, for instance? Should the approach be Officer Friendly? Or should
children receive a Marxist interpretation of how the power structure uses the
police as its first line of control in urban ghettoes? Does the approach we
choose depend on whether we teach in the suburbs or the inner city? If a more
complex analysis of the police is more useful than Officer Friendly for inner-
city children, does that mean we should teach about slavery in a different way
in the suburbs than we would in the inner city?
In 1992, Los Angeles exploded in a violent race riot, triggered by a white
suburban jury’s acquittal of four police officers who had been videotaped
beating a black traffic offender, Rodney King. Almost every child in America
saw this most famous of all home videotapes. Therefore, almost every child in
America learned that Officer Friendly is not the whole story. We do not protect
children from controversy by offering only an Officer Friendly analysis in
school. All we do is make school irrelevant to the major issues of the day.
Rock songs bought by thirteen-year-olds deal with AIDS, nuclear war, and
global warming. Rap songs discuss racism, sexism, drug use—and American
history. We can be sure that our children already know about and think about
these and other issues, whether we like it or not. Indeed, attempts by parents to
preserve some nonexistent childhood innocence through avoidance are likely
to heighten rather than reduce anxiety.^99 Lying and omission are not the right
ways. There is a way to teach truth to a child at any age level.
Because history is more personal than geology or even American literature,
more about “us,” there is an additional reason not to present it honestly: don’t
we want our children to be optimists? Maybe textbooks that emphasize how