Preparing Students to Repeat the Mistakes of the Past

What exactly happens when you put political groups in charge of supervising how their recent historical mistakes are depicted to serious current students of history? Perhaps you ennoble those flagrant errors by perpetuating as “fact” distorted explanations of actions, fomenting embarrassing omissions and offering jingoistic mythology instead.

Fact: the United States upset the delicate balance of Shiite-Sunnis relations – which had achieved stasis in the 1990s following the disastrous Iran-Iraq war – by deposing an Iraqi Sunni minority (the Saddam Hussein regime) and replacing it, under the guise of democracy, with a virulent anti-Sunni, pro-Iran, Shiite majority government, all under the guise of defending the world from so-called “weapons of mass destruction,” which were never found. Old rivalries were rekindled, new violence escalated.

Mythology: the United States entered Iraq for the noble and primary purpose of deposing a brutal tyrant, rescued that nation with a new-found democracy and liberated that nation into modernity. The instability that followed simply stemmed from our removal of American forces years too soon.

Omitted facts: torture at Abu Ghraib prison, rogue and knowing killings by our forces and “contractors” of clearly innocent civilians, massive waste and corruption, urination by U.S. forces on the bodies of slain “enemy fighters,” the massive and failed search for WMDs, the misstatement by the President of the United States (“mission accomplished”), the failure to understand the internecine factions that were held together by a fragile glue that fell apart with the forced regime change fomenting an angry Sunni-led attack with suicide and other bombings of Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad, the rise of the global perception of the United States as an unthinking bully, creating recruitment material for radical Islam and maintaining a prison facility in Cuba (Guantanamo), fed by secret CIA prisons where waterboarding was routine, which is and was consistently lambasted even by our allies as unlawful and contrary to everything that America claimed its values to be.

Risk: Students read and internalize the mythology set forth in “sanitized” textbooks as fact, rise through the ranks of governmental and private sector achievement and carry the belief that the United States would be justified in seeking regime change for its own ends, that American democracy is the proper solution for developing nations’ strife and that we can enter a distant and alien theater of conflict and be hailed and loved as liberators.

The battle lines have been drawn over the revised materials generated for the Advanced Placement courses that students vying for better positioning in their college applications almost always add to their high school curriculum. In particular, the confrontation seems to have settled heavily on AP History. Take for example the position of the very conservative school board in Jefferson County. Colorado as they reviewed the acceptability of the new texts to be furnished to their own AP history students.

Pushing back against the legendary College Boards, the school district found these texts to be offensive to American values and distortive of how the United States is presented. While the texts have yet to be revised to deal with the ISIS movement, they have been revised to reflect social changes throughout our history. “The new AP history curriculum adds two periods: life in the Americas from 1491 to 1607, which addresses the conflicts between Native Americans and European settlers, and from 1980 to the present, which includes the rise of social conservatism and the battles over issues such as abortion, as well as the fight against terrorism after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and demographic and economic shifts of the 21st century…

“[I]n Jefferson County, controversy over the new AP standards boiled over in recent weeks after the school board’s recently elected conservative majority pushed back at the College Board. The school board plans to set up a new committee to review the curriculum with the goal of assuring that courses — in the words of board member Julie Williams — ‘present positive aspects of the United States and its heritage’ and ‘promote citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits of the free enterprise system.’” Washington Post, October 5^th.

But the socially (versus “fiscally”) conservative movement across the United States has made it clear that they do not want American students to be presented with negative statements about the United States and that “facts” need to be presented in a most positive light. I would suspect that might lead to the conclusion that the current system in the United States is just fine and does not require much fixin’. Forget about recent and highly accelerating income polarization, Congressional gridlock and plunging reading, problem-solving and mathematical abilities.

“The College Board, which administers exams to students upon the completion of AP courses, has revised the history curriculum in ways that have angered conservatives, who say it paints a darker picture of the country’s heritage and undervalues concepts such as ‘American exceptionalism.’…

“On Sept. 19, the Texas State Board of Education went on record against allowing the new AP curriculum framework in state classrooms. Legislators and activists in South Carolina and Tennessee are discussing similar moves. And at its summer meeting in August, the Republican National Committee passed a resolution branding the curriculum ‘a radically revisionist view of American history that emphasizes negative aspects of our nation’s history while omitting or minimizing positive aspects.’

“The new framework also came up at last month’s Value Voters Summit in Washington, a conservative meeting that drew a number of possible 2016 GOP presidential contenders. Ben Carson, a pediatric neurosurgeon who is considering a White House bid, told the gathering that the new AP history framework is so anti-American that ‘I think most people, when they finish that course, they’d be ready to sign up for ISIS,’ the Middle Eastern terrorist group also known as the Islamic State.” The Post. If the fight were for fabrications and genuine untruths, that would acceptable, of course. But it is not. We call that censorship.

I’m Peter Dekom, and how are we going to stop making the same mega-mistakes if we educate the next generations of leaders to believe that those mistakes were actually accomplishments or at best neutral events?