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Let's begin with a short, easy history quiz. We have only two multiple-choice questions, and they both concern local lore. First, which of the following is a truthful accurate account of the founding of Denver?
A) Hearty pioneers, all God-fearing rugged individualists, in their search for a better life for themselves and their children, braved the fierce Great American Desert to reach the gold fields of the Pikes Peak Country. At the junction of Cherry Creek and the South Platte River, they quickly established schools and churches. Their hard work, prayer and thrift resulted in the growth of a great city.
B) A gang of genocidal racist whoremongers, eager to enrich themselves when they weren't indulging in drunken brawls with knife and gun, illegally invaded Arapaho territory and began selling land they didn't own. Through swindles, graft and bribery, their townsite promotion scheme succeeded to their great profit.
Now the second question. Which offers an accurate history of Leadville?
A) The Magic City
by Ned Blair, which concerns a
glittering and cultured landscape of carbonate kings,
opulent banquets and opera houses?
B) A Miner's Epic
by Steve Voynick, about a
gritty underground realm of starvation wages, crippling
injury and frequent death?
Both answers to both questions are right. That's the problem with the infamous new guidelines proposed for the teaching of American history in schools. It's also the problem with the traditionalist critics of those standards.
The traditional argument, inferred from a close reading of the collected works of St. William of Bennett, appears to run like this: Teach American youngsters that Christopher Columbus brought the blessings of civilization to the barbarians of the New World, that George Washington prayed constantly and never told a lie, that young Abe Lincoln devoutly read his Bible by the light of a flickering fire, that the Mexican War was just retribution to blood-thirsty Santa Ana for his massacre of innocent Americans at the Alamo.
If all American children learn these important lessons from the past, then they will grow up as wholesome patriots, ready to enlist in the Army before going to work for Exxon.
The revisionists hold the same essential view, that the teaching of history is an excellent way to mold young minds into the proper pattern. They just apply it to a different selection of what history has to offer.
Teach children that Columbus launched a wave of brutal slaughter, that George Washington owned slaves and speculated in land, that Abraham Lincoln was a corporate lawyer, that the Mexican War was American imperialism.
And if children ingest all this, then they will become mellow non-hegemonic non-sexist holistic respect-for-Native-Americans-who-lived-in-perfect-harmony-wi th-nature Afro-centric multi-culturalists. They'll be so pure and P.C. that they'll be able to live in Boulder, maybe even Aspen or Berkeley.
Both sides obviously see the teaching of history, not as an end in itself, but as a way to produce the right kind of person. One side wants to mass-produce docile cannon fodder; the other wants to ensure that future generations will respect indigenous cultures and save the rain forest.
The real question in the current controversy is not whether Harriet Tubman or Thomas Edison was more important. It's whether the history that is taught succeeds in its real purpose of indoctrinating youngsters.
Alas, it does not. My own school days, and those of fellow baby boomers, were filled with pageants of virtuous Pilgrims and their friend Squanto, with tableaux of George Washington praying at Valley Forge, with tales of young Abe Lincoln wading through snow drifts, with the heroism of Gen. George A. Custer leading his noble troops against the savage Sioux.
What was the result of all this traditional history, surely designed to make unruly children into four-square patriots suitable for corporate or military service? A bunch of draft-dodging unkempt malcontents.
If the revisionists got their way, if every American child learned that Pythagoras stole geometry from Timbuktu while Frederick Douglass invented the light bulb, would we really get a pluralistic nation of respectful harmony? Let's get real. This wouldn't work any better than the traditional method did.
How, then, should history be presented?
I have read that in the Philippines, near the spot where Ferdinand Magellan received his fatal wounds on April 27, 1521, there stands a monument.
On this monument, Magellan is commemorated as a brilliant, brave and resourceful mariner, which indeed he was. The monument also boasts a bronze plaque which rightfully honors Lapu Lapu, a rajah of Mactan Island, for leading the defense of his people against Magellan's invasion.
I don't know whether this double memorial is revisionist or traditional, but it is a good way to look at history.
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