"Florida's Fear of History" by Robt. Jensen

[Charles Brown <cbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Florida's Fear of History: New Law Undermines Critical Thinking

by Robert Jensen

One way to measure the fears of people in power is by the intensity
of their quest for certainty and control over knowledge.
By that standard, the members of the Florida Legislature marked
themselves as the folks most terrified of history in the United
States when last month they took bold action to become the first
state to outlaw historical interpretation in public schools. In otherwords,
Florida has officially replaced the study of history with the imposition of
dogma and effectively outlawed critical thinking.

Although U.S. students are typically taught a sanitized version of
history in which the inherent superiority and benevolence of the
United States is rarely challenged, the social and political changes
unleashed in the 1960s have opened up some space for a more honest
accounting of our past. But even these few small steps taken by some
teachers toward collective critical self-reflection are too much for many
Americans to bear.

So, as part of an education bill signed into law by Gov. Jeb Bush,
Florida has declared that "American history shall be viewed as
factual, not as constructed." That factual history, the law states,
shall be viewed as "knowable, teachable, and testable."
Florida's lawmakers are not only prescribing a specific view of US
history that must be taught (my favorite among the specific commandsin the
law is the one about instructing students on "the nature and importance of
free enterprise to the United States economy"), but are trying to legislate
out of existence any ideas to the contrary. They are not just saying that
their history is the best history, but that it is beyond interpretation. In
fact, the law attempts to suppress discussion of the very idea that history
is interpretation.

The fundamental fallacy of the law is in the underlying assumption
that "factual" and "constructed" are mutually exclusive in the study of
history. There certainly are many facts about history that are widely, and
sometimes even unanimously, agreed upon. But how we
arrange those facts into a narrative to describe and explain history is
clearly a construction, an interpretation. That's the task of historians --
to assess factual assertions about the past, weave them together in a
coherent narrative, and construct an explanation of how and why things
happened.

For example, it's a fact that Europeans began coming in significant
numbers to North America in the 17th century. Were they peaceful
settlers or aggressive invaders? That's interpretation, a
construction of the facts into a narrative with an argument for one
particular way to understand those facts.

It's also a fact that once those Europeans came, the indigenous
people died in large numbers. Was that an act of genocide? Whatever
one's answer, it will be an interpretation, a construction of the
facts to support or reject that conclusion.

In contemporary history, has U.S. intervention in the Middle East
been aimed at supporting democracy or controlling the region's
crucial energy resources? Would anyone in a free society want
students to be taught that there is only one way to construct an
answer to that question?

Speaking of contemporary history, what about the fact that before the 2000
presidential election, Florida's Republican secretary of state removed
57,700 names from the voter rolls, supposedly because they were convicted
felons and not eligible to vote. It's a fact that at least 90 percent were
not criminals -- but were African American.

It's a fact that black people vote overwhelmingly Democratic. What
conclusion will historians construct from those facts about how and
why that happened?

http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=217&row=2
<http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=217&row=2>

In other words, history is always constructed, no matter how much
Florida's elected representatives might resist the notion. The real
question is: How effectively can one defend one's construction? If
Florida legislators felt the need to write a law to eliminate the
possibility of that question even being asked, perhaps it says
something about their faith in their own view and ability to defend
it.

One of the bedrock claims of the scientific revolution and the
Enlightenment -- two movements that, to date, have not been repealed by the
Florida Legislature -- is that no interpretation or theory is beyond
challenge. The evidence and logic on which all knowledge claims are based
must be transparent, open to examination. We must be able to understand and
critique the basis for any particular construction of knowledge, which
requires that we understand how knowledge is constructed.

Except in Florida.

But as tempting as it is to ridicule, we should not spend too much
time poking fun at this one state, because the law represents a
yearning one can find across the United States. Americans look out at a
wider world in which more and more people reject the idea of the United
States as always right, always better, always moral. As the gap between how
Americans see themselves and how the world sees us grows, the instinct for
many is to eliminate intellectual challenges at home: "We can't control what
the rest of the world thinks, but we can make sure our kids aren't exposed
to such nonsense."

The irony is that such a law is precisely what one would expect in a
totalitarian society, where governments claim the right to declare certain
things to be true, no matter what the debates over evidence and
interpretation. The preferred adjective in the United States for this is
"Stalinist," a system to which U.S. policymakers were opposed during the
Cold War. At least, that's what I learned in history class.

People assume that these kinds of buffoonish actions are rooted in
the arrogance and ignorance of Americans, and there certainly are
excesses of both in the United States.

But the Florida law -- and the more widespread political mindset it
reflects -- also has its roots in fear. A track record of relatively
successful domination around the world seems to have produced in Americans a
fear of any lessening of that dominance. Although U.S. military power is
unparalleled in world history, we can't completely dictate the shape of the
world or the course of events. Rather than examining the complexity of the
world and expanding the scope of one's inquiry, the instinct of some is to
narrow the inquiry and assert as much control as possible to avoid difficult
and potentially painful challenges to orthodoxy.

Is history "knowable, teachable, and testable?" Certainly people can work
hard to know -- to develop interpretations of processes and events in
history and to understand competing interpretations. We can teach about
those views. And students can be tested on their
understanding of conflicting constructions of history.

But the real test is whether Americans can come to terms with not
only the grand triumphs but also the profound failures of our
history. At stake in that test is not just a grade in a class, but
our collective future.

Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin
and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center
http://thirdcoastactivist.org/ <http://thirdcoastactivist.org/> . He is the
author of "The Heart of Whiteness: Race, Racism, and White Privilege" and
"Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity" (both from City
Lights Books). Email to: rjensen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx