I am just not in contact with high schools and what they teach.  I assume 
that it must be very bland but that is only a guess.  Social studies, as 
history was called when I was in high school in the 1960s, was generally 
quite bland.  But it all depended on the teacher.

In middle school, I happened to take social studies from a Japanese-American 
man who had suffered some of the indignities foisted on his people during WW 
II.  He was a loyal American but as you can imagine his view of life in the 
US and his view of world affairs in general was quite different from the 
norm, a la Elaine Tyler May.  I started reading Japanese history under his 
tutelage.  Our math teacher there was from India.  When he had exhausted us 
teaching us geometry, he began talking about village life in India north of 
New Delhi.  One of the great problems with school segregation--de jure in 
the past, de facto at present--is the homogeneity of students and teachers; 
hence the homogeneity of what they learn and teach.

In high school I had a number of ordinary social studies teachers but in my 
senior year I entered a class taught by a man who taught college 
anthropology at night while maintaining a fulltime job teaching high school. 
His class on international relations was a revelation.  He used a standard 
COLLEGE textbook and demanded that we write essays, as did our senior 
English teacher.  (Remember, this was a inner city "ghetto" high school.)

I learned a lot in grade school, both within the curriculum and by reading 
outside of it, but the greatest lesson I learned was how important learned 
and aggressive teaching is to a person's intellectual development.  (This is 
the main reason I became a teacher.) Much of grade school social studies is 
preparation (if not propaganda) for citizenship.  This is not in itself a 
bad thing but it is useless preparation for the critical analysis of human 
affairs in the very different venue of a liberal arts college where critical 
thinking is the coin of the realm.

The tendencies of American educational reform since the end of the 1960s is 
to make colleges more like high schools, not high schools more like 
colleges.

I think that much of importance flows from this including our sometime 
preference to lean on myths about American history so we can live our 
ordinary lives without inner conflict.  I think that our debates about "PC" 
history, etc., have their basis not only in disagreements about historical 
facts but also in a substrata of psychological need for a usable past:  a 
past that provides psychological comfort.   In the crisis of the late-1960s, 
it was academic historians, Clinton Rossiter, Robert Starobin, Douglass 
Adair, and others, who committed suicide.  At the time I found this very 
curious.  Why did historians resonate with the crisis of the times, while 
economists, political scientists, and physicists just go on doing their 
jobs?

I will hazard a guess that deep knowledge of the history of a complex and 
conflicted society/civilization across time is a risky venture.  Moreover, 
history as a discipline doesn't generate theories that can insulate the 
thinker from the reality she/he is studying.
Eugen Weber wrote:  '"Nothing is more concrete than history, nothing less 
interested in theories or in abstract ideas.  The great historians have 
fewer ideas about history than amateurs do;  they merely have a way of 
ordering their facts to tell their story.  It isn't theories that they look 
for, but information, documents, and ideas about how to find and handle 
them.'" (From NY Times obit. of Eugen Weber, 5/22/07)  This may sound dull 
and distant but I insist that a lifetime of disciplined searching produces 
something like direct experience.

I will conclude with an analogy which has affected me ever since I read of 
it.  Ralph Waldo Emerson was a Transcendentalist, which was a peculiarly 
American version of continental Romanticism.  One term in the canon of 
Romanticism was the requirement of a direct experience with Nature in all 
its forms.  Thus, Emerson decided to make weekly visits to the tomb of his 
first wife, whom he loved dearly and who died shortly after they were 
married.  On each visit he looked into the coffin and observed the process 
of bodily decomposition.  It was at this time that Emerson began to write 
the essays and books for which he is remembered.  Much later in life, his 
only son Ralph, jr. died.  Emerson repeated the tomb visitation he had done 
with his first wife, watching Ralph, jr. deteriorate.  After about a year, 
Emerson stopped the visitation and basically stopped writing for the rest of 
his life.

The moral and emotional relationship of a serious historian to her/his 
society is I think essentially equivalent to normal peoples' relationship to 
their loved ones.  For me, the art and the ethical burden of being a 
historian lies within the formulation of the previous sentence and the above 
analogy.

Harold S. Forsythe
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Paul Heinegg" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, May 24, 2007 10:20 AM
Subject: Re: Should we regret "PC" history?


> Lyle E. Browning wrote:
> Kids who grew up in the 50's were certainly taught a rosy view of our
> past. Into the 1960's that was still true. Then came the counter-
> culture, exploring all sorts of things that were seen anything in
> opposition to the stultifyingly dull, the insipid Leave It To Beaver
> type of life. The bloom came off the rose and we then discovered the
> downside of past hero type folks. Rather than having the maturity to
> say, "whoa, these guys weren't all perfect, but they had some good in
> them", that they were imperfect but did good things, we did the bi-
> polar thing and consigned them to the trash heap. Was that idealism?
> ----------
> My wife took a senior course at Temple University a year ago which used 
> the book, "Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era" by 
> Elaine Tyler May (1999). The book is about white Americans in the 50s. You 
> would not know there were African Americans in the U.S. except for a few 
> brief remarks including one in the introduction, "Although the nation 
> remained divided along lines of race and class, and only members of the 
> prosperous white middle and working classes had access to the surburban 
> domesticity that represented the "good life," family fever swept the 
> nation and affected all Americans."
>
> Why don't those who are complaining about "PC" history give us some 
> examples of exactly what they object to and a few examples of "PC" texts 
> widely in use in universities. There are certainly none that I am aware of 
> that are in use in high schools. Don't you think seniors in high school 
> are mature enough to hear that their country has sometimes behaved in a 
> less than perfect manner?
> Paul