Some fault may lie with the massive amount of ... book is not the only reason
these chapters are never reached; teaching the recent past is controversial, or at
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Chapters 9 & 10 Down the Memory Hole For this review, considering Chapter 10 out of sequence may be enlightening. Loewen ruminates on 'The Disappearance of the Recent Past' and considers why so few teachers manage to reach the end of the textbook by the end of the year. Some fault may lie with the massive amount of information between the covers, incorporating every detail that may be dear to the heart of each member of every textbook adoption committee in the country. Trying to fit it all into nine short months is a tremendous task, and some chapters inevitably fall off the radar. Loewen suggests that proximity to the end of the book is not the only reason these chapters are never reached; teaching the recent past is controversial, or at least teachers imagine it will be, and it is much easier to avoid controversy. Most parents, administrators, publishers, and politicians were participants or at least witnesses - in the recent past, and surely a handful of them will take issue with the manner in which the events of their own lifetime are addressed by teachers. Perhaps it is better to skim over these decades. Many African societies divide humans into three categories: those still alive on the earth, the sasha, and the zamani. The recently departed whose time on earth overlapped with people still here are the sasha, the living-dead. They are not wholly dead, for they still live in the memories of the living, who can call them to mind, create their likeness in art, and bring them to live in anecdote. When the last person to know an ancestor dies, that ancestor leaves the sasha for the zamani, the dead. As generalized ancestors, the zamani are not forgotten but revered. Many, like George Washington or Clara Barton, can be recalled by name. But they are not living-dead. There is a difference. Because we lack these Kiswahili terms, we rarely think about this distinction systematically, but we also make it. Consider how we read an account of an event we lived through, especially one in which we ourselves took part, whether a sporting event or the Iraq War. We read partly in a spirit of criticism, assessing what the authors got wrong as well as agreeing with and perhaps learning from what they got right. When we study the more distant past, we may also read critically, but now our primary mode is ingestive. Especially if we are reading for the first time about an event, we have little ground on which to stand and criticize what we read. Authors of American history textbooks appear all too aware of the sasha - of the fact that teachers, parents, and textbook adoption board members were alive in the recent past. They seem uncomfortable with it. Revering the zamani - generalized ancestors - is more their style. By definition, the world of the sasha is controversial because readers bring to it their own knowledge and understanding, so they may not agree with what is written. Therefore, the less said about the recent past, the better (Loewen 259).
However, this is only better if you are a publisher concerned with getting your textbook approved by the adoption boards and purchased by many schools - the more, the better. It is not better if you are primarily concerned with presenting an accurate and comprehensive account of recent history, and it is not better if you want to engage student in issues about which they may disagree and argue and thereby become more engaged, informed, and skilled citizens. In his survey of high school textbooks, Loewen discovered that most invest scant effort into recent decades. He counted up the average number of pages devoted to each decade and noted a steady correlation. "...Today's texts, published between 2000 and 2007, give short shrift to the new recent past...they devote forty-nine pages to the 1930s and fortyseven to the 1940s, but fewer than twenty to the 1980s and 1990s (even tossing in the first few years of the new millennium.) Yet these were important decades in which the United States twice attacked Iraq, went through the second presidential impeachment trial in history, saw its closest and most disputed election in more than a century, and endured the terrorist strikes of 9/11/2001," (Loewen 260). One argument for keeping mum on the sasha says that with time, our historical perspective will improve. We cannot be objective about events too close to us. Nonsense, Loewen replies. "In writing about the recent past, then, textbook authors may not be disadvantaged by any lack of historical perspective. On the contrary, the recency of events confers three potential benefits upon them. First, since the authors themselves lived through the events, they were exposed to a wealth of information...second, multiple points of view are available, each backed by evidence, more or less convincing. Third, authors are free to do research themselves...armed with this information, textbook authors could then develop a story line about the recent past that would be interesting as well as informative,"(Loewen 264). Loewen takes issue with the white-washing of American motives in international arenas. How can students understand current and future events if they operate from a simplistic and inaccurate assumption that America is an 'international good guy'? As an extended example of the lack of depth and serious scholarship devoted to the recent past, Loewen analyzes how the textbooks present events of 9/11/2001. He believes since that students cannot draw on a store of knowledge about Middle East and US politics, they cannot intelligently interpret current events. This disconnect fuels the "they hate our success" theory of terrorism instead of debunking it. "Presenting a nation without sin - one that has always conducted its Middle Eastern policies evenhandedly and with the best intentions toward both Palestinians and Israelis, for example - merely leaves students ignorant, unable to understand why others are upset with us. Such presentations also fuel the students' ethnocentrism - the belief that ours is the finest society in the world and all other nations should be like us....any history course that further increases this already robust ethnocentrism only decreases students' ability to learn from other cultures," (Loewen 296).
Within this context, we can return to Chapter 9, See No Evil: Choosing not to look at the war in Vietnam. Now we are better able to understand why students know so little about this war; it is still part of the sasha. Not for the students, and perhaps not for their parents and teachers, but likely for the textbook authors and publishers. Lowen polled adults over age 40 to list the most searing images they remember from this time. As the first war to be televised, images and video played a new and powerful role in communicating the details of a far-off war to the American public. Of the seven top images, including the self-immolation of a Buddhist monk, the little girl running naked from a napalm attack, and the national police chief shooting a man at arm's length, only the image of the police chief appears in the texts Loewen reviewed, and just in one. Omitting these images deprives students of not just information but the emotional response that would inform their understanding of the divisive impact of the war on civilians in the US.
Nick Út, Associated Press. June 8, 1972 Interestingly enough, Loewen mentions that Joy Hakim elected to include several of these images in her textbook A History of US, written for fifth graders. "Surprisingly, Hakim also gives her readers the image of the little girl running naked down Highway 1. This is surprising because textbook publishers typically follow the rule of 'no nudity'; as one editor told me, 'in elementary books cows don't have udders.' Yet her series has been a bestseller - perhaps because it also reads better than most standard textbooks," (Loewen 252). Phillips Brooks, the elementary school I taught at in Menlo Park, California, used this text. I found the book fascinating, so unlike other history texts I had encountered.
The fifth grade teachers complained that the narrative was confusing and presented too many stories and not enough facts marching along the timeline to give kids a comprehensive overview of the time period. The books came in a set of skinny volumes, and as the class only studied the Colonial period, I don't think the PBS kids were exposed to these images from the Vietnam war, after all. Avoiding offending any portion of the textbook audience was not the only problem Loewen encountered. As he read textbook after textbook, Loewen noticed something rather strange. Chunks of prose sounded awfully familiar, and on closer investigation, he found evidence for what would be considered plagiarism in most literary circles.
(Loewen 253) In the textbook industry, however, this seems to be fairly common and not alarming. Loewen points out that the authors listed on the textbook cover are often not the people who actually wrote the narrative. In-house writers or contracted freelancers do the writing, and the listed authors review (or rubberstamp) the material, perhaps redrafting sections, and perhaps not. In some cases, the core narrative may have changed little from the original edition of the book, which could have appeared as long as fifty or sixty years ago. The word choice and perspective reflect the mindset of that time, not the present, and are more likely to be subtly supportive of the dominant culture. Even when starting from scratch, not simply updating a new edition, authors and freelancers do not work from a blank slate. They fashion their new textbook after existing, successful ones. When learning about the Vietnam War, Loewen proposes this list of "reasonable" yet possibly "still controversial" questions: Why did the United States fight in Vietnam? What was the war like before the United States entered it? How did we change it?
How did the war change the United States? Why did an antiwar movement become so strong in the United States? What were its criticisms of the war in Vietnam? Were they right? Why did the United States lose the war? What lesson(s) should we take from the experience? (Loewen 254) Yet, even if we posed these questions, our kids couldn't begin to answer them, because they lack historical context. Their history texts have not examined how issues connect as cause and effect. When historical researchers ask, "Is Iraq another Vietnam?", without a solid understanding of the root causes and major issues of Vietnam, where do we expect our students to start?
