Chariots of the Goddesses

Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit.com cites A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World, by Tony Horwitz, and muses: ‘Reading the jacket copy, however, I wonder if the “conventional” middle-school history against which Horwitz is apparently reacting exists any more. At least, my daughter tells me that in her history classes it's all Native Americans and African Americans, with the European settlers mostly as foils and backdrops.’
 

One explanation for his daughter’s experience could be that school curricula are so hopelessly ‘politically correct’ that Europeans must needs be the bad guys while blacks and American Indians must be victims and good guys. This line of reasoning may certainly have merit, all the while carrying the seeds of its own contradiction.
 

Invariably, such logic perpetuates the ‘noble savage’ myth espoused by many 17^th and 18^th century Europeans (I suspect that earlier, Europeans would simply have considered indigenous Americans savage, with no though of inherent nobility). Perversely, the PC crowd would condemn the noble savage concept as racist even as their victim rhetoric supports it.
 

I wonder, however, if a far more insidious principle is at play here. School curricula will always morph based on prevailing intellectual fashion. There’s no correct way to teach history or any other subject—or at least no single one. I fear that the real issue may be a garden variety dumbing down of school requirements. The great thing about making Indians and black colonists (willing or usually otherwise) the focus of history classes is that there is so much less material to actually learn. Not because Indians and African slaves didn’t contribute to the history of America, but because for varying reasons, their contributions are generally undocumented.
 

The indigenous cultures left few, if any, written clues, leading to mere speculation generally, augmented occasionally with arcane archeological analysis or lunatic Chariots of the Gods raving. The efforts of slaves, on the other hand, were simply ignored, disregarded, or co-opted by whites in most cases.
 

This is not to say we know nothing about Indians and black colonists, merely that far less was documented contemporaneously, and therefore is unavailable for historical analysis now. So because there's less ‘hard fact,’ there’s conveniently a smaller body of material to require kids to learn in school. Names and dates assume a lower priority, because too frequently, these names are unknown to us. Let’s just make up a history based on what we think might have happened. (There’s a parallel here to neo-druidism where nutcase Englishmen dance around Stonehenge practicing the ‘old religion.’ An old religion about which we know absolutely nothing.)
 

Well, plus the fact that Europeans were beastly.