CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS ON U.S. HISTORY EDUCATION. I’m going to post a bunch of thoughts related to this excellent essay, but first, here are some quotes to get you excited: It was time for one of those full-dress cultural sham-fights, like the earlier one about core values and “Western Civ,” that animate the op-ed pages every decade or so. We need new standards! Alas, with no galvanizing Sputnik to unlock real money and talent, and with no encircling foe to spark another rewrite of the Pledge of Allegiance, federal monies went to subsidize a rather pallid and prolix set of “guidelines” that might as well have been marketed as “American History–Making a Difference Since 1776” or “Our Past–Serving the Community with Pride.” As with many such trite labelings, however, the small print should have carried the dire admonition “Contents Under Pressure” or “Some Assembly Required.”

…In 1950, Henry Steele Commager and Samuel Eliot Morison jointly produced a textbook entitled The Growth of the American Republic. Describing the antebellum state of affairs below the Mason-Dixon line, they wrote:

As for Sambo, whose wrongs moved the abolitionists to wrath and tears,

there is some reason to believe that he suffered less than any other

class in the South from its “peculiar institution.”

I would not, personally, wish to be deprived of this excerpt when teaching American history. Essay questions and classroom discussions might inquire: (1) What “reason to believe”? (2) Why were abolitionists so moved? (3) What gave rise to the notable coinage “peculiar institution”? (4) Why did both camps believe they had biblical authority? and (5) What has changed in America since 1950 to stop distinguished Yankee historians from employing the term “Sambo”? I think any competent teacher would and should have been able to cope with any “hurt feelings” that might arise in or out of the classroom. (If there were no such feelings, then something other than history would be the subject being taught.) But as matters stand, we have Southern textbooks that euphemize the Confederacy, Northern ones that scant the whole unpleasant subject, and a recent national debate on a possible presidential “apology” for slavery so etiolated that hardly anyone thought to ask whether President Lincoln’s Second Inaugural had not in fact contained a rather finely worded section on the subject, dealing not just with apology for slavery but with real-time revenge for it.

….This is how the Greeks, more honored by invocation than by emulation, conceived the theory and practice of teaching by dialectics. What was the influence of Pericles’ funeral oration on the Gettysburg Address? This engrossing question, open to any mind of average ability, cannot even be asked if, as was recently discovered, the majority of America’s schoolchildren don’t know in which century the Civil War was fought. But if an appreciation of history as a continuous argument, and not a dull Whiggish series of “problems resolved,” can be instilled, then a student entering college might be ready to attempt the pleasurable exercises of a reasonably trained mind. False and emptily moralistic trails, such as “Are We Too Eurocentric?” or “Was Columbus Ecologically Friendly?” can be abandoned in favor of the real thing. Why did Basil Davidson have to refute Hegel in order to show that Africa had a history? Was Bertrand Russell right in saying that the disappearance of North American Indians was no tragedy? And why was he banned from teaching in the United States? Had Russell read Bartolome de Las Casas, first historian of the Americas, who doubted that the “discovery” had been a good thing? Why did the first historian of the Americas have a Spanish name? Why do New Yorkers no longer speak Dutch, and who proposed that the official language of the United States be German? Was the Civil War really fought to free the slaves? Why are Woodrow Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” unthinkable without Lenin’s dissolution of the Constituent Assembly? Was the Great Depression caused by too little government intervention or too much? Why is the largest military base in Cuba an American one? Why is it possible to swim from America to Russia?

Each of these questions admits of several answers, many of them equally “valid.”

More on this presently–but there’s much more good stuff in the essay, so click that link!