December 6, 2002
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Ideas vs. Reality
For a while now I've been kicking an idea around in the back of my head. It all got started after I read Lies My Teacher Told Me and Lies Across America.
The basic premise of the books is that the teaching of history in American schools is horribly flawed. Facts are left out for fear of offending various groups, and anything that doesn't show a steady upward climb is for the most part left out (don't want the kiddies to get demoralized). Historic events are also depicted as happening in a vacuum -- if the Vietnam War is covered at all, it's assumed to start with the U.S. sending soldiers in the early '60s, not the French colonization in the first half of the 20th century -- which makes everything seem random and disjoint. To top it all off, it's boring as all hell. Students plod through a morass of dates and names, and don't actually learn anything. The result is an overwhelming apathy towards American history, and the prospect of not learning anything from our collective mistakes over the last 500-plus years.
So because I have tons of time on my hands, and Loewen (the books' author) planted the idea in my head, I want to write an American history book that might actually be useful. My only problems are my writing ability -- or more my lack thereof -- and my unwillingness to do the research necessary for the job. This couldn't be a 7-page high-school research paper where I borrowed three books from the library and wrote it over a weekend. It would involve months, maybe years, of research to get us from the late 1400s up to now, and would probably involve libraries across the country as a base to really do it right. And to top that all off, it would have to be edited down to about 600 pages to be able to be covered in a typical 180-day school year.
It could be done, sure, but I don't think I'd be willing to see it through to completion once I got into the hard stuff. So here I sit with this great idea, and I'm unwilling to even try. God I suck.
I = dumb
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Posted by Dallas on December 10, 2002 12:34 PM.
I see now that you only wish to write American history. Still, my previous points apply.
Re: I = dumb
Posted by Jason on December 10, 2002 9:41 PM.
All good points especially given that Churchill's series was, as you said, friggin' huge. Even though American history doesn't go back as far as British (Europe in the mid-1400s would be a good start for us) it would be quite an undertaking.
And you're of course right about the what-stays-what-goes problem. So maybe it's impossible. But part of me still wants to try.
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The real trouble
is that you wish to write a comprehensive, interesting, useful textbook. All textbooks aspire to this. They fail because it can't be done: these characteristics contradict each other in some way. If you make it comprehensive (covering a broad, deep, long swath of history), you'll make it not only too long for a textbook, but it will be nearly impenetrable. If you make it interesting, you'll be forced to omit details for clarity amd brevity and the sanity of the student. These editorial decisions can lead to bias--what you find uninteresting (say, the history of Ghana) may tend you to write a book entirely about Western Europe, which is a criticism of many texts. If you make it useful, pointing out major figures, dates, and keeping only relevant information and major trends, you are not only dry, but editorializing again.
The solution? Teach multiple texts. History is far too large to be covered in one book. Hell, Churchill's History of the English-speaking Peoples was 12 books or so on ONE CULTURE. The problem isn't that students aren't being taught history well, it's that they don't want to learn it.
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