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 17th
and 18th 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.
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