What Should We Teach Our Children About American History? (February/March 1992 | Volume: 43, Issue: 1)

What Should We Teach Our Children About American History?

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Authors: Fredric Smoler

Historic Era: Era 10: Contemporary United States (1968 to the present)

Historic Theme:

Subject:

February/March 1992 | Volume 43, Issue 1

In 1987, a sweeping revision of the social studies program in New York State public schools gave the curriculum a strong multicultural slant. It was not strong enough, however, for a task force on minorities appointed by Thomas Sobol, the state education commissioner, in 1989. This task force rendered a report that included an immediately notorious assertion: “Afro-Americans, Asian-Americans, Puerto Ricans/Latinos and Native Americans have all been the victims of an intellectual and educational oppression that has characterized the culture and institutions of the United States and the European American world for centuries.” This “Eurocentric” approach had allegedly instilled an ugly arrogance in students of European descent.

The task-force report provoked a great deal of publicity when one of its authors, Professor Leonard Jeffries of the City College of New York, who is a zealous promoter of an “Afrocentric” curriculum, became known as the author of the hypothesis that the pigment melanin is the source of intelligence and creativity. Jeffries divides humanity into “sun people” and “ice people,” the latter being not only melanin-deficient but militaristic, authoritarian, and possessed of a host of other racially determined defects.

We’ve always been a multiethnic country. Americans have been absorbed by diversity since the eighteenth century. Even the national motto refers to it.
 

In response to public outcry Sobol appointed a new commission to review the social studies curriculum. In 1991, the commission rendered a report which, while considerably more moderate in tone, recommended that the social studies curriculum for the 2.5 million schoolchildren of New York be revised once again to place greater emphasis on the role of nonwhite cultures. Nor was New York alone in this concern. Multiculturalism has become a national movement, leading to textbook controversies in California and other states and to the imposition of Afrocentric curriculums on the public schools in a number of cities across the land.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., twice winner of a Pulitzer Prize, is an eminent and productive American historian; he is also a well-known liberal with a long-standing weakness for intervening in contentious public debates. It was presumably in the first capacity that he was invited to join the commission set up to review New York State’s social studies curriculum. It was in the second capacity that he wrote a strong dissent from the commission’s report. Subsequently, Schlesinger set forth his views of multiculturalism in a small book called The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society. Recently, I spoke with him in his office at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he is Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities.

You’ve pointed out that the forging of a multicultural American identity is not a question suddenly put on the agenda by some iconoclasts in a comp lit department but in fact preoccupied the Founders and has interested a lot of people ever since.

That’s true. We’ve always been a