Who chopped down the cherry tree?

Allan Winkler describes the furore unleashed when the US tried to establish guidelines for teaching history.

Teaching history in America these days is not for the faint-hearted. Recently released voluntary guidelines for teaching the subject in secondary schools have aroused tremendous opposition from conservative critics who charge that they represent a liberal plot. Critics range from Lynne Cheney, former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities which originally funded the effort to define standards, Newt Gingrich, new speaker of the House of Representatives and author of the Contract With America, the Republicans' conservative manifesto, and Rush Limbaugh, the reactionary talk show host who has become a dominant figure in the American cultural scene.

Despite the inflammatory charges, the movement for national standards is hardly a partisan manoeuvre. It began when Republican President George Bush met with the nation's governors in 1989. They agreed that the United States needed to set educational goals. To provide a focus, the bipartisan National Council on Education Standards and Testing recommended voluntary standards in the different high school disciplines.

In history, the National Centre for History in the Schools at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) assumed responsibility for helping co-ordinate the effort to define standards. It worked with a grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities. Gary B. Nash, one of the nation's foremost social and labour historians and a professor of history at UCLA, provided the intellectual leadership in what became a massive, broad-based effort.

The UCLA group laboured over a two-year period and involved nearly 6,000 teachers, scholars, administrators, and community leaders in the drafting process. It enlisted 35 organisations in the review effort. These included groups such as the American Historical Association and Organisation of American Historians, the most prominent professional groups in the United States. Also included were other community and national groups. Focus groups comprised of members of all these associations reviewed the standards, time and time again, as they took shape.

The standards have recently been issued and are now available to the public. Three volumes were published. One dealt with United States history; one focused on world history; and one dealt with history for children between kindergarten and fourth grade. In all areas, drafters sought to encourage the development of analytical skills as well as to promote topical themes for classroom use. In the American and world history volumes, the early sections dealt with chronological thinking, historical comprehension, historical analysis and interpretation, historical research, and appraisal of decision making. Then the volumes dealt more specifically with the major historical eras. In the process, particularly in examples showing how the standards could be implemented, the drafters made a concerted effort to include the contributions of women and minorities who had been excluded from the story in the past.

Almost as soon as they were released, the standards, particularly the books dealing with American and world history, ran into a firestorm of protest. Critics charged that the standards left out important contributions hailed in the past and argued that the compilation distorted the perspective for multicultural political ends.

Lynne Cheney took the offensive. First, she published an opinion piece, entitled "The End of History'', in the Wall Street Journal in mid-October, 1994. She began by declaring: "Imagine an outline for the teaching of American history in which George Washington makes only a fleeting appearance and is never described as our first president. Or in which the foundings of the Sierra Club (an environmental organisation) and the National Organisation for Women are considered noteworthy events, but the first gathering of the US Constitution is not.'' A week or so later, on Good Morning America, a national news show, she stepped up her attack and said, "There's a whole lot of basic history that simply doesn't appear. Students who learn their history according to these national standards . . . wouldn't be aware that George Washington was our first president . . . They wouldn't know that James Madison was the father of our constitution.'' Gary Nash retorted on the same programme that her charge was "insulting to teachers''. He pointed out, for example, that Madison was one of the authors of the constitution, not the author. He and others repeated that great white men appear on every page of the report.

Other critics soon joined the battle. Newt Gingrich said the standards reflected an elitist, left-wing programme to subvert American values. And Rush Limbaugh told his talk show listeners to flush the standards down the toilet.

Now the protest has gained a more pointed political dimension. In mid-January, the United States Senate passed an amendment to the Unfunded Mandates Bill by a margin of 99-1 that sharply criticised the standards and said that no federal funds could go to the National Centre for History in the Schools at UCLA that drafted the guidelines. While the resolution simply expressed the sense of the Senate and was not enforceable, and while the full bill awaited passage, the message was clear.

On another front, both the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) need reauthorisation this year, and there is a real possibility that congressional hearings may address the issue of standards, given original NEH support. And once public hearings are held, the issue is likely to become even more politicised than before.

The controversy took drafters of the standards by surprise. "None of us realised we were walking into a buzz saw,'' Gary Nash observed at the recent annual meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago. He and others became involved with the project in an effort to share their expertise with the larger educational community, only to find themselves subjected to searing attack.

How do we account for the furore? Part of the problem stems from the format of the final report. The standards themselves are straightforward, covering all major periods and events. Originally, drafters had intended to publish them first, and to provide amplifying examples later. Teachers involved in the project, however, urged that the examples be part of the original draft. But the examples conveyed a multicultural perspective that seemed to grate on the sensibilities of critics. As Diane Ravitch, a senior research scholar at New York University, has observed: "Most people have grown up proud of America's democratic traditions. But historians seem to celebrate everything that is non-white, non-western, and non-male, while criticising everything that isn't''.

The larger problem is that the standards have become one focus in a growing debate about who controls the way we describe the past. "Who Owns History?'' the Chronicle of Higher Education, the American equivalent of The Times Higher Education Supplement, asked recently. "There's a growing sense that history doesn't just belong to academics,'' Arnita Jones, executive secretary of the Organisation of American Historians, reflected a few weeks ago. "People are asserting their own version.'' The debate over the standards is not going to die down easily. Americans, like other people, cling to their myths, and are not likely to relinquish them, particularly in a time of social and economic strain. Yet historians and other scholars need to help people understand that history can be more inclusive without distorting the story or neglecting the contributions of the heroes from former years. Likewise, they need to convey the notion that history is not a static discipline. Interpretations evolve continuously, as each generation seeks to reevaluate the past from its own point of view.

Despite all the criticism, the standards make sense. They were drafted through a painstaking consensual process. They made a concerted effort to understand the contributions of all Americans to the national heritage. And they do provide the schools with a balanced view of the past.

Allan M. Winkler is chair of the department of history at Miami University.