There’s a lot of hoopla lately about Texas and their history textbooks. Or more precisely, about the Texas State Board of Education and the textbook standards they recently voted into office. The new books are supposed to be more accurate. That means less Roosevelt, more Reagan, less Jefferson, more Confederacy. Or so Roger Ebert says.
This Texas textbook controversy is just the latest culture war skirmish. But if you want to understand what textbooks do, why they matter, and maybe why they don’t have to matter so much–beyond Texas–read on.
1. History textbooks never offer objective truth.
I spent about a third of my college degree on history. When I chose that major, I expected to get plenty of reading time, plenty of facts, and a wealth of understanding about how and why people did what they did, way back when. It took me about a semester and a half to achieve complete disappointment.
Disillusioned disappointment, actually. Historiography disillusioned me; that -ography is the study of how people and countries and everyone changes their collective story—their history—over time. Changing the past happens every generation or so, or even several times in a generation. It’s so natural and common that it would be completely weird if Texas wasn’t revising the past.
So my disappointment came when I realized that there’s a lack of objective truth that no amount of learning can fill. I was disappointed to learn that there is not just one story, not just one reason why, for anything, for everything.
The past is more our collective invention than anything else.
2. History textbooks always have a point of view.
We take our invented past, our collective story, and we put it into textbooks.
We make guesses about the past and write our history, based on what someone wrote, or what someone said, or what someone thought someone said, or maybe even what bits of the past suit your current philosophy.
It’s the last option, more than you’d think. It’s natural. It’s what we do. We learn some facts, we try to analyze them, but everything we think, everything we say about our experience or the collective American experience, has a perspective. Is anyone surprised that Texas by and large thinks Christianity influenced our founding fathers more than what they read in textbooks written before the modern age of Right-Thinking-Christians versus Everyone-Else-Even-Moderate-Christians?
The past is more our collective, changing invention than anything else.
3. History textbooks don’t discuss current events, but they do change them.
Our country’s founders framed our nation in the Constitution. And then they passed the country and the Constitution on to the next generation. Knowing more about who they were and what they said and in whom they believed doesn’t necessarily inform our choices now.
But what we tell our children, what we teach our children if we teach them anything, in large part determines our future. The stories they learn now will shape their thoughts, feelings, and opinions on everything that comes along later.
You’re here today. What do you want today? What do you want your child to believe, and act on, later?
4. History textbooks can become less important than they are.
Other states use the books that Texas chooses because those textbooks become the cheapest ones. But that happens only when local parents like you allow it to. How about going to a local school board meeting and asking for better textbooks? They (and you) are abdicating a responsibility to choose well by choosing only on price.
But insisting on better textbooks is only a tiny step. Real improvement comes when you get involved personally, well beyond simply griping about Texas textbook standards on your Facebook status.
Your child has questions. Find our what they are. Try to answer them. Try to find the answers with them. Teach your children that challenging the story is the best skill that school can teach them, even if it is not trying to. And if your child doesn’t have questions, then your first question is, “What happened to his curiosity?”
If you don’t know how to investigate and research, how did you find this post? Do that for your question. Google it. Go to Wikipedia. Ask your friends for help in finding resources.
Your local teachers will love the help. Start by asking your child’s teacher his first name. Find out what she needs and how you can help her get it. This conversation is not about you pushing a specific story or book or point of view into her classroom. This act is about you getting involved at home and at school by connecting. And then helping your child and his teacher use the best resources well, not just the cheapest, most convenient ones in all the traditional, rote-learning ways.
Textbooks establish merely the starting point for learning. They become an ultimate authority only when teachers and students and parents stop questioning and stop learning and stop talking.
