Amid arguments over critical race theory and allegations of inaccurate history curricula in our schools, the Texas State Board of Education is considering new lesson plans that might eliminate history altogether in at least two grades. This raises a valid question: Which is worse — teaching false history, or no history at all?
It appears that traditionally, people have had a strong appreciation for history. Stories of colonial revolutionaries and rugged pioneers have helped most Americans develop a sense of pride and national unity. Tales of days gone by build and strengthen state and local community bonds. Just about everyone is familiar with the old saying that those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Somewhat lesser known are other statements that challenge even established history, such as Napoleon’s contention that history is nothing more than accepted lies, or that history is merely a collection of stories told by the winners of wars.
The recent growth of competing versions of events, the rise of “alternative facts” and “fake news,” however, surely causes more people to question the history they know. After all, today’s current events are tomorrow’s history, and if we can’t agree on what’s happening as it’s happening, how can we be confident that the retelling years from now will be accurate — or even true?
While those questions might be new to many people, they have been debated among Texas policymakers for years. Every time our State Board of Education looks to update student textbooks, national news articles relate how the board usually rejects existing history and social studies books, and writers often are hired to custom-write Texas texts. Readers of those articles often are left to question why the board turns away the work of independent historians: Are they trying to skew history lessons in a way that will promote state legends and positions?
Ongoing debates about CRT and news that the board recently turned down requests that the word “slavery” be omitted from texts and replaced with “involuntary relocation” give strength to such questions.
Now that the board is considering the outright omission of history classes, reportedly in fourth and seventh grades, some people might wonder if omitting history, at least in some grades, might be better or worse than presenting versions that some might consider state-sponsored indoctrination of our children.
Surely most people would agree that ignorance of the past would deprive students of knowledge that can help them learn the outcomes of past decisions and help them make their own decisions for the future. We can only hope that policy makers see the wisdom in training a skeptical eye toward any efforts to rewrite history, whether they include CRT lessons that might wrongly generalize real but targeted incidents of racism or to those that downplay real examples of our society’s struggle to meet the standards of equality, justice and individual freedom that have been set in our nation’s founding documents.
May they know the facts, and may they tell the truth.
