Looking Into the Mirror of History

History is fluid. It changes from one person to another, in how it is taught and how it is perceived. History, like scripture or politics is impossible to absorb and analyze without personal bias. Every school child in America is taught stories of our national history that exemplify the greatest virtues of what Americans feel they should be. Catch phrases like, “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” are a part of the collective memory of almost anyone who attended public school. When we are spoon fed this kind of information in this way it becomes very easy to accept what we are learning as fact. It may never occur to us that the epics of our childhoods are in fact, monumental falsehoods. Author James Loewen, in his book Lies My Teacher Told Me, explores many of the historical inconsistencies taught today, he writes, “History is furious debate informed by evidence and reason…Textbooks encourage students to believe that history is facts to be learned”(Loewen, 8)With this in mind, it is important to analyze history, and how it is taught, with a critical eye. The transformation from historical accuracy to cultural myth has to do a great deal with how reading itself has changed over the last hundred years. We have access to so much more information in our day and age than did those in prior generations; whether it is newspaper, television or the internet, Americans are bombarded with information. With so much going in and out of our brains all the time we have very little time to process, analyze and verify the information that we consume. As an adult, engaged in a study of history it is crucial to understand how society’s interpretation of history has been skewed by an education system that discourages deeper understanding of the events that have defined it.
How we read as a society and a culture greatly affects how we study and learn about history. In his Essay “The Owl Has Flown” writer Sven Birkerts takes a close look at how our culture reads. He talks about how our society has moved away from intense reading because of technology and the ready availability of material. He says, “With the proliferation of mechanically produced books and the democratization of education, reading not only spread rapidly, but changed its basic nature.”(Birkerts, 71) The concept of the democratization of education is an interesting one to explore, and ties directly into the modern day perceptions of history. Education today is to a great extent a pedagogy of the masses. No longer do isolated teachers in small schoolhouses relate their knowledge of the world, to small groups of pupils. Today, mighty school corporations educate thousands of children at a time. Curriculum is handed down from an administrator who receives it from other sources. This is one factor that leads to events being misconstrued. It is human nature to change facts or ideas to fit our own interests. People do this every day. Who hasn’t run a stop sign on a rainy day and blamed it on the weather. We immediately seek an outside source upon which to blame our deficiency. We say “Well, the roads were wet and I didn’t think I could stop.” We say this to eliminate the guilt of doing wrong. We conveniently change our perception of the event to feel better, and in doing so, our perception becomes our reality. The same thing occurs on a larger scale in history. The story of Christopher Columbus is one of the best examples. Columbus is portrayed as one of the greatest minds in history, as a man whose courage and spirit of exploration paved the way for the founding of our nation. This depiction of Columbus feels very good. The truth however, is inconvenient; the truth that perhaps he wasn’t as altruistic and noble as some would have us believe. It does not feel good to teach that the driving force behind Columbus’s first and subsequent voyages was not to “prove the world was round”(a fact that was actually well accepted by most scholars of the time.) or any such nonsense, but to secure a tariff free route to the East Indies, thereby becoming very wealthy. In chapter 2 of his book, which specifically talks about Columbus, Loewen writes, “Textbooks downplay the pursuit of wealth as a motive for coming to the Americas when they describe Columbus…Their authors apparently believe that to have America explored and colonized for economic gain is somehow undignified.”(Loewen, 36) This is why the basic history we are taught in schools has become distorted. It is as if those in charge of curriculum, from the writers and publishers of textbooks to school principles and department heads are afraid to teach real history. They seem to fear that if they teach history as it happened, not just the great triumphs but the dark moments also, that children will become disillusioned, and think critically about the nation and society.
One way that we can overcome the fairy tales we have been taught in school is to read history with intentionality. You can do this by reading and doing research with the intent that you are going to discover the truth about what you are reading. This will often include reading one or more reliable sources in depth. The purpose of this sort of intentional reading is not merely to learn more about what you are studying but to understand it better. There is a difference between knowledge and understanding that is crucial to comprehend. When we gain knowledge of something we can recite facts about it, we can spew out interesting points on cue, maybe even teach it to others, but we can’t synthesize it with other information. Understanding is reached when you realize the implications of what you are studying, both to other events and times in history, and to your life. For example, someone with knowledge of the seven years war can tell you that it was waged from 1756 to 1763 and was fought by Britain and France. A person with an understanding can show you its ramification on both the American and French revolutions, and how it restructured political power in Europe forever. The difference between knowledge and understanding could also be called wisdom. Berkerts says, “Wisdom has nothing to do with the organizing of facts—this is basic. Wisdom is seeing through facts, a penetration to the underlying laws and patterns.”(75) We fail to teach this wisdom in schools, therefore if people are to gain wisdom for themselves, they must choose to do so. Without wisdom, history can be re-written every time it is told. Personal biases emerge and sensationalism takes hold. Loewen talks about this sensationalism in regards to the ever-present disparity between classes in America. He found that, “Half of the eighteen high school American history textbooks I examined contain no index listing at all for social class…three list middle class, but only to assure students that America is a middle class country.”(Loewen, 206) It is as if textbooks would have students believe that hunger and poverty don’t exist in America. The idea of America as the “land of opportunity” has been a pervasive one in the world for almost two hundred years, drawing countless thousands of immigrants from across the globe. These immigrants came to America looking for land, wealth and happiness and found only poverty and strife. Poverty continues to this day in our inner cities, Native American reservations and rural mountain communities, and is routinely over looked by those in power and citizens at large. The likely reason for this being that we as Americans are trained from a young age by textbooks and the teachers who teach them, to overlook those things in society that make us uncomfortable with our national image. We call it patriotism, but it is really, selective perception. Berkerts expresses concern over this as well, he writes, “The lack of perspective hobbles the mind, leads to suspiciousness and conservatism…After a while the sense of scale is attenuated and a relativism resembling cognitive and moral paralysis may result.”(Berkerts, 73) This is exactly what our history education does to students, it stunts their perspective. As a society we have put red, white and blue blinders on them, encouraging them to see only what is “good” about the nation we have built. This has begun to lead to the moral paralysis that Berkerts writes about. For example, take the Gauntanomo bay prison facility. For just under eight years Americans as a whole have stood by and done nothing while our government illegally detained hundreds of prisoners without just cause or evidence, routinely violating their rights as human beings. Americans stood by and watched this happen, not because we are evil people, but because we have been taught that if America does it, it is probably good. We have a lack of perspective; we do not remember the forced marches of Native Americans away from their homes, or the Japanese internment camps that indefinitely imprisoned American citizens during World War II, for no other reason than their ancestral heritage. If the American people had been encouraged to more deeply understand history as children growing up, it is very likely that the prison would never have stayed open, Americans would have demanded it closed from its beginning.
You cannot truly understand history if you only examine the parts that make you feel good about yourself and your nation. History, like a person is the sum total of all of its parts, not just the good, not just the bad. Choices have been made in history for both good and evil, and through these choices we have a unique window into not only events, but also the human soul. What it means to be human, and what it means to be American are written on the pages of history. So, when we study it, it’s important to see the whole picture, to fully understand what makes us the nation that we are. When we look at ourselves through the mirror of history we may not like what we see, but it is who we are. We will see that we unrightfully enslaved a people, but we also fought, and sacrificed lives to free them. We will see that we dropped a bomb that killed tens of thousands of people but we will also see that we died by the thousands to topple a tyrant, and put an end to the genocide of an entire race. Understanding that America has done wrong, does not make us Un-American, it makes us that much more proud of the incredible force for good that our nation has been, and can be, in the world.

Works Cited

Loewen, James W. Lies My Teacher Told Me. New York: Touchstone, 2007.

Berkerts, Sven. "The Owl Has Flown." Making Sense. Coleman, Bob, et al. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.pp. 71-76.