Teaching history is not an exercise in propaganda

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 25/08/2023 (785 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It is an axiom that a middle or senior school history textbook reflects the era and values of the specific moment in time that the author (or authors) writes it.

Hence, a Canadian history textbook used by students in 1910 taught them about the wonders of European civilization graciously bestowed upon “primitive” Indigenous peoples, who were regarded as “heathen savages” that needed to be saved.

By the time I was in grade 11 in 1973, the Canadian history text we used was Challenge and Survival written by three Winnipeg educators and published in 1970. The book’s early chapters were still focused on the “discovery” of Canada by the French and English, though given the changing times, the authors also acknowledged “Indians” as the “First Canadians,” who “taught the white man how to survive in the harsh environment of North America.”

Embracing a more modern perspective, the authors, to their credit, noted the short- and long-term mainly negative consequences of Indian-White contact.

While there was no mention of residential schools and their devastating impact on Indigenous communities, the authors included a poignant comment from David Courchene, who was then president of the Manitoba Indian Brotherhood. “The end result of the whitemen’s [sic] misguided interpretation of our needs,” Courchene said, “has been to destroy our society, to tear asunder our self-reliance and to deny us the benefit of human equality and compassionate understanding.”

I do not recall whether our teacher ever drew our attention to Courchene’s words or discussed it in class. It took more than a decade, by which time I was teaching this same course, with an updated textbook, before the cold and hard facts of Indigenous life in pre- and post-Confederation Canada were imparted to Manitoba high school students.

And even then, not all teachers were initially comfortable doing so.

The teaching of history in Manitoba and elsewhere in Canada might not be perfect, yet it has continued to evolve so that such subjects like the tragedy of residential schools and the discrimination and prejudice inflicted on several immigrant groups have become an accepted part of classroom lessons. Students, in theory at least, are taught to critically think about these complex issues with openness and sensitivity.

This progressive evolution of historical teaching — accepting that a country’s history has good, bad, and controversial features — is what sets education in democracies apart from authoritarian states or dictatorships.

In Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, for example, history lessons were nothing less than propaganda and indoctrination, designed to literally brainwash young students to heed the regime’s particular ideology — no questions asked.

This manipulative process continues to the present day.

As CNN reported, in early August, Russia’s Ministry of Education recently issued new history textbooks for students of all ages with added sections “about the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine, the annexation of Crimea and Western sanctions.” Russian president Vladimir Putin’s aim is, according to critics, to “stifle any independent thinking.”

The creeping authoritarianism evident in some U.S. states, all with Republican Party governments, has led to similar, though slightly less blatant, manipulations of the history content taught in middle and senior schools.

Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee-Sanders (who served as Donald Trump’s press secretary) passed an executive order banning “teaching that would indoctrinate students with ideologies.” To this end, she has denounced the A.P. African-American Studies course as a “propaganda leftist agenda teaching our kids to hate America” — as convoluted a statement as you could come up with.

Meanwhile in Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis — champion of “anti-wokeness” and a candidate to the be the Republican nominee in the 2024 presidential election — has similarly approved legislation that now “bars instruction in schools that suggests anyone is privileged or oppressed based on their race or skin color.”

This is an absurd premise if you consider the history of slavery and African-Americans in U.S. history. Nonetheless, Florida’s new academic standards for Social Studies, includes a requirement for middle-school students (grade 6) to be instructed in “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

This fallacious “benchmark clarification” is included in a 216-page document created following months of consultations with an assortment of educators and historians, which makes it even more difficult to accept.

The new guidelines do include references to violence and discriminatory practices perpetuated against African-Americans, as well as sections on the Holocaust and antisemitism.

Yet, even if you accept that slaves acquired skills they later used, purposely omitted in the curriculum are the horrors of slavery: the terrible abuse, rape, beatings, torture and violent separation of children from their parents at slave auctions. There is a not-so-subtle “both-sideism” that runs through the manual, implying that while, yes, white Americans did mistreat African-Americans; on occasion, African-Americans carried out violent attacks against whites or somehow were to blame for the brutal attacks and killings inflicted upon them.

DeSantis, predictably, argues that his critics are “intentionally misinterpreting the language” in the new curriculum.

He is wrong.

Florida’s young students, like those in Arkansas and elsewhere, these states’ future voters and leaders, will not be served well by learning skewed history that is more propaganda than truth.

Now & Then is a column in which historian Allan Levine puts the events of today in a historical context.