Whose History?: The Struggle for National Standards in American Classrooms

Rating:
Summary: Sloppy argument colors informative post-mortem
Review: It is a truism that history is written by the victors. However, in Whose History? The Struggle for National Standards in American Classrooms, Linda Symcox gives us history written by the losers. As a principal participant in the National Standards for History project, Symcox is among the academics and educational professionals who lost the battle to define a consensus American history. Her book provides a post-mortem on how conservative activists engineered a total rejection of the Standards. Understandably biter about the hatchet job done on the product she and others worked hard to produce, Symcox seeks to understand the genesis of the conservative backlash and place the battle she lost in the context of the larger, longer culture wars waged over social studies curriculum. Though she attempts to take the tone of an academic researching a series of events, her bias often reveals her to be still engaged in the argument, not merely studying it.
Symcox has a firm command of the intellectual development of history as an academic discipline. With a brisk narrative, she documents the paradigm shift from the great man/great event theory of history (embodied by the presidential synthesis) to the new social history (marked by specialties such as African-American history and women's history). While I was familiar with the broad outline of this development, it was fascinating to learn how knowledge theory normally applied to hard science had this profound effect on the social science. Her work has filled-in the detail and fleshed out the backstory of the events with which I was moderately familiar.
Symcox lays out the coordinated effor that would doom the National History Standards she worked on. But her indignation over the tactics of the standard's opponents seems almost naïve. She frequently points out that she has uncovered how the critics were working in cahoots with one another. In one instance she states, "By examining this network of relationships, one can see this group coalescing around a common cause." In another she writes, of Lynne Chenney's Wall Street Journal column, "This opinion piece was evidently part of an orchestrated campaign," as if this were a revelation.
Lines such as these pepper the text and left me with the impression that Symcox thinks connecting the dots among the players constitutes a major contribution to understanding the situation. Her tone suggests that the damning nature of this fact is self-evident, reminding me of the tone when Hillary Clinton cited a "vast-right wing conspiracy" against her husband. But political coordination of a campaign for or against something is as old as politics itself and is as pervasive on the left as on the right. Her outlook seems to be that it's one thing that Lynne Cheney, E.D. Hirsch, William Bennett and Slade Gorton opposed the standards; but it's quite another thing that they talked to each other about their common cause. The implication is that this was downright sinister.
Unsophisticated political analysis such as this is the fatal flaw of Whose History?. This double standard is minor, however, compared to the double standard Smycox applies to those who would set curriculum. Symcox chastises the Reagan administration for vacating the public space of education. The undesirable result is that Educational Testing Service and textbook companies end up setting curriculum. We are told this is bad not because it results in the wrong curriculum or in weak curriculum, but because it is undemocratic.
What is notable here is that these private corporations, whose interest is to preserve the existing social order, are not necessarily accountable to the public. They operate outside the system of checks and balances that supposedly forms the basis of our government, and they respond solely to market forces. If we leave policy making to these institutions and the play of market forces, it raises serious questions about how democratic that policy can be.
Similar criticism is directed at the intellectuals driving Reagan-era policy. Despite their enormous influence, "few could be held accountable to the electorate." The result was that, "these unelected pundits dictated national educational policy." At no point is any evidence presented that the curriculum arrived at by unelected pundits and market forces preserving the social order is a poor curriculum or harmful to the nation's students.
Having posited that unelected, unaccountable people making curriculum policy is a bad idea, Symcox later makes this statement, "... research scholars are undoubtedly the best qualified to determine the content of the K-12 curriculum..." Unless Symcox is aware of a cadre of elected, publicly-accountable research scholars, she has a serious double standard on her hands. I am left with the impression that Symcox is able to justify the proposition that the people she doesn't want making policy need to be elected to do so, but the people she does want making policy needn't be.
After all this suspicion of the unelected, and those who don't face the electorate, Symcox's greatest disappointment is in the U.S. Senate, the one prominent organization in the book that does face the voters. In assessing the impact of the 99-1 censure of the Standards, Symcox notes disapprovingly that the Senate, "gave its imprimatur to a single official version of American and world history." Symcox's tone is clear. Though she has discovered why this happened and how it happened, she disagrees with the Senate and still resents its action. She leave us to guess how she squares this distaste for the decision of 99 elected officials (who are certainly accountable to the voters) with her alarm for the fact that ETS, textbook companies and conservative pundits are unelected.
Democracy may be a great way to make curriculum, but if so Symcox fails to show how. Conversely, there may be a compelling argument that democracy is a lousy way to make curriculum. But Symcox certainly doesn't make it. There is probably a good argument that research academics are the best qualified to set curriculum standards. But Symcox doesn't make that argument. She merely states it without support. That's too bad, it's an argument I'd like to hear.