The Importance of History

In last Friday's L.A. Times, David Geletner wrote an interesting column about the amazing laxness in history education in this country. I agree with his overall point - in the hierarchy of classroom subjects, history frequently gets shunted aside for math and the sciences. I'm still amazed that friends of mine made it through college without taking a history class. In addition, it's largely thought of as a dry recitation of dates and facts that can't possibly relevant to modern life. To the contrary, the past informs most (if not all) of what happens in terms of international and national politics and culture. So we definitely need to do a better job of teaching it.

The problem with history, however, is that it is often inconvenient and doesn't fit with many interest groups' ideas of right or wrong or what should be. To that end, Geletner concludes:

There is an ongoing culture war between Americans who are ashamed of this nation's history and those who acknowledge with sorrow its many sins and are fiercely proud of it anyway. Proud of the 17th century settlers who threw their entire lives overboard and set sail for religious freedom in their rickety little ships. Proud of the new nation that taught democracy to the world. Proud of its ferocious fight to free the slaves, save the Union and drag (lug, shove, sweat, bleed) America a few inches closer to its own sublime ideals. Proud of its victories in two world wars and the Cold War, proud of the fight it is waging this very day for freedom in Iraq and the whole Middle East.

I think he oversells his point. Yes, there is a faction on the far left who see almost all of American (and, more broadly, European) history as a tale of dead, white, heterosexual males who were driven by racism, greed, sexism, and religious fervor to wipe all the other people off the face of the earth. On the other hand, there seems to be an equal, if not larger, faction on the right who think that Americans are always right and have always acted with the best of intentions, even if those intentions resulted in things like slavery and McCarthyism.

The truth, of course, lies somewhere in the middle and is a complex mesh of different strands of action by numerous different groups. But that's too complicated to teach in schools, most people think, so it gets simplified into either "American good" or "American bad" and the interest groups line up to fight another pitched battle in the culture wars.