I love History. And hate what the Academics have done to it.
REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Textbook Jungle
Today's history books aren't just politically correct. They're boring.
Friday, April 9, 2004 12:01 a.m.
Remember that classroom scene in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" where a monotone Ben Stein plays a teacher boring his class half to death? If two recent studies are any clue, the boredom Mr. Stein inflicted on the silver screen is now the reality in all too many history classrooms across America.
In this case, however, the blame is going to the texts and not the teachers. For "A Consumer's Guide to High School History Textbooks," the Thomas B. Fordham Institute (www.edexcellence.net) commissioned assorted historians and teachers to review six popular texts in American history and an equal number in world history. As its title suggests, "World History Textbooks: A Review" (www.historytextbooks.org)--undertaken by the American Textbook Council (ATC)--is also a review of several texts, although it is narrower in scope and more unified in its editorial voice.
Whatever their differences, the two studies reach the same conclusion: Bad history makes for tedious textbooks.
Take Prentice Hall's "World History: Connections to Today." Though one of the most popular high-school texts in America, this book received low marks from both studies. One Fordham reviewer criticized the book for its attempts to "redress prior imbalances in civilizational coverage by at times inflating or elevating one culture or civilization's achievements at the expense of European or Western accomplishments." For example, Columbus's voyage to the New World is attributed not to European advances but to contributions from "Muslim astronomers and navigators."
The problem is not just incipient political correctness and questions of balance. As the ATC review notes, these texts also elevate lush photos and handsome graphics over a coherent story line. And the "exercises" that students are asked to do can be more deadening than the words they are asked to read. Is any 10th-grader really equipped to answer the larger questions--whether war is ever justified, whether diversity strengthens or weakens a society, what limits there should be on freedom of speech--based on the barest exposure to the past?
"Such instructional exercises," the ATC asserts, "do not--as they claim to do--promote genuine critical thinking. They discourage deep reading on the subject and invite facile discussion. They promote classroom sloganeering. They favor the glib student and the showboat teacher."
Overall, the Fordham reviewers noted that no textbook scored higher than a C+, and five of the 12 failed altogether. "Is it any wonder," Chester E. Finn Jr. writes in the foreword, "that most students rank history or social studies among their least favorite subjects in school?"
Though all these reviewers have definite ideas about where the texts go wrong and how to fix them, what they're really after is something akin to what, say, David McCullough's prize-winning biography of John Adams so plainly offered: a ripping good read.
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