56 percent—“have doubts but still want to teach to children”
30 percent—“don’t believe and don’t want to pass on to
children”Thus, 56 percent of parents wanted their children not to doubt authority
figures, even though the parents themselves doubted.^102
Some adults simply do not trust children to think. For several decades
sociologists have documented Americans’ distrust of the next generation.
Parents may feel undermined when children get tools of information and
inquiry not available to adults and use them in ways that seem to threaten adult-
held values. Many parents want children to concentrate on the three R’s, not on
multicultural history.^103 Shirley Engle has described “a strident minority [of
teachers and parents] who do not really believe in democracy and do not really
believe that kids should be taught to think.”^104 Perhaps adults’ biggest reason
for lying is that they fear our history—fear that it isn’t so wonderful and that if
children were to learn what has really gone on, they would lose all respect for
our society. Thus, when Edward Ruzzo tried in 1964 to cover up Warren G.
Harding’s embarrassing love letters to a married woman, he used the rationale
“that anything damaging to the image of an American President should be
suppressed to protect the younger generation.” As Judge Ruzzo put it, there are
too many juvenile delinquents as it is.^105
Ironically, only people who themselves have been raised on shallow feel-
good history could harbor such doubts. Harding may not have been much of a
role model, but other Americans—Tom Paine, Thoreau, Lincoln, Helen Hunt
Jackson, Martin Luther King, and, yes, John Brown, Helen Keller, and
Woodrow Wilson, too—are still celebrated by lovers of freedom
everywhere.Yet publishers, authors, teachers, and parents seem afraid to
expose children to the blazing idealism of these leaders at their best. Today
many aspects of American life, from the premises of our legal system to
elements of our popular culture, inspire other societies. If Russia can abandon
boosterish history, as it seems to have done, surely America can, too.^106 “We
do not need a bodyguard of lies,” points out Paul Gagnon. “We can afford to
present ourselves in the totality of our acts.”^107
Textbook authors seem not to share Gagnon’s confidence, however. There is
a certain contradiction in the logic of those who write nationalist textbooks. On
the one hand, they describe a country without repression, without real conflict.