This week's article summary is Are History Textbooks Worth Using Anymore?
When I lived in Oklahoma, I taught 8th-grade history at a K-12 independent school. I taught World History up to the Renaissance where the 9th-grade history class began.
Every few years the 9th-grade history teachers and I reviewed new textbook options.
Reading the article below reminded me that back then our elusive hope was that our new textbook would be more multicultural, include different viewpoints about important historical events, and not hold back on history’s complexities—its good, bad, and ugly. While there were always a few cursory additions to newer textbooks, the one we ultimately selected never came close to our hopes, as textbook publishers catered to the preferences of large school districts, especially those in Texas, and hence omitted the darker side of history (all the stuff that kids and history teachers find so fascinating!).
Writing one-volume surveys of history is rare today. The most recent—and one I recommend highly—is Jill Lepore’s These Truths. Unlike the blander textbooks I used in 8th grade, Lepore’s history of America is premised on our country being founded on inherent contradictions that we continue to grapple with today: the Declaration of Independence and Constitution both espouse freedom and equality for all under the law yet ignored slavery, negated women’s rights, and allowed for the persecution of Native Americans. While this textbook is replete with the good, bad, and ugly of American history and details the experiences of those often marginalized in other textbooks, the reader nevertheless needs to understand that Lepore has a particularly strong stance about America, which you might or might not agree with.
As a whole-to-part learner, I have always liked textbooks because they provide a big-picture overview of the subject. Yet just as Lepore’s textbook has a theme, readers need to ask themselves what may be missing or what else they need to learn to get the complete picture of the subject matter. While the article below recommends using primary sources rather than textbooks, even primary sources are biased and subjective.
Back in Oklahoma, I wish I had taken more time to have my students reflect on what was missing in the textbooks we read, what perspective the author was writing from, and whose voices and experiences were missing.
Even in Trinity’s elementary school environment, we can guide our students to be more questioning about what they read and see. For me, preparing kids for the future includes developing in them a healthy skepticism and an inquiring mindset about what more they need to know.
Joe
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Among contemporary education critics, the textbook is a classic and perennial foil—perhaps because its contents are a compromise between experts and politicians, groups with sometimes competing agendas. This is especially true of history texts, which attempt to distill complex and contrasting events into simple, linear narratives, often at the expense of nuance and unpleasant truths. Yet despite these limitations, textbooks are still the most popular way to teach and learn history.
Education historian Diane Ravitch contends that “every textbook has a point of view, despite a facade of neutrality.” Beyond names and dates, she notes, “there is seldom, if ever, a single interpretation of events on which all reputable historians agree. History is anything but agreeable.”
Textbooks pass through innumerable hands before they ever reach a classroom. And states play an outsized role. Textbooks are shaped by state standards, approved by state legislatures, and reviewed by panels of educators appointed by state departments of education, who can request significant revisions from publishers. A recent New York Times analysis detailed how the most influential states, Texas and California, produce markedly different versions of the same texts from publishers “shaded by partisan politics.”
The California version of a popular McGraw-Hill textbook, for example, includes language on redlining and housing discrimination against African Americans after the Second World War; yet the Texas version does not. Depending on what state they’re sold in, textbooks with the same titles either temper or amplify subjects like Reconstruction, LGBTQ rights, and gun control.
“The truth of the matter is education is political,” says Tinisha Shaw, a former history teacher in North Carolina.
Tellingly, although Shaw has helped write standards at the state level—the same ones that influence textbook adoption—she hardly ever used them in her own classroom, due in part to what she sees as flaws in how textbooks are written and adapted, as well as their tendency to overly script curriculum.
“I’m more of the thought of getting rid of the textbooks,” she says. Instead, she suggests that each teacher create curated lists of materials they’ve vetted—“primary sources and secondary sources that hit particular themes that we discuss.” It’s for sure a different approach to teaching history, but one that’s gaining currency with educators who want their students to explore a greater variety of viewpoints.
Of course, history texts across the board have changed significantly over the past half-century, stripping out narratives of European and American exceptionalism along with myths minimizing the impacts and conditions of slavery. And publishers have made at least some effort to add more multicultural and diverse perspectives. Still, too often the story of women and people of color is not woven into the central narrative of the textbook but is relegated to sidebars and special sections.
An even bigger issue is the need to prepare students for an uncertain and protean future—the so-called fourth industrial revolution. They need strong critical-thinking skills, and just teaching to the textbook is not enough.
Despite the fact that history isn’t made from any one source, textbooks can only teach students how to digest a narrow synthesis of history written from a single perspective, which may be as untenable as it is undesirable. What students really need is to encourage students to work with primary sources themselves. That way they’re doing the work of historians—following an approach known as historiography--contrasting various points of view and coming to their own conclusions. In essence, not trying to teach students what they should think but how to think.
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