SEPTEMBER 11 was a transforming moment in the civic imagination of many Americans. To them, the attacks drove home the reality that pluralism, religious tolerance, equality, freedom, and prosperity are not the default condition of mankind but a fragile gift of history in need of our reverence and protection.
But not to the National Council for Social Studies (NCSS). The leaders of this 26,000-member organization of teachers of history, sociology, geography, political science, psychology, and economics saw matters differently. They were sure the attacks would provide the excuse Americans wanted to indulge their reflexive racism and "revenge-oriented ideology," as one writer put it in the October issue of the organization's magazine Social Education. "For some the events of September 11 were reminiscent of Pearl Harbor," editor Michael Simpson began his introductory essay. "Following that attack the treatment of the Japanese-American population opened a dark chapter of American history."
At the organization's national conference in November, keynote speaker James Loewen (author of "Lies Across America," a tour of the nation's monuments, whose "lies and omissions . . . suggest times and ways that the United States went astray as a nation") warned against patriotic displays like the singing of "God Bless America." "The Swedes," he noted, "the Kenyans don't think God blesses America over all other countries." Alan Schulman, a participant in a panel examining "The Impact of September 11th on Social Studies Professionals" at a meeting of a Greater New York NCSS-affiliate chapter, got to the heart of the matter. Responding to a teacher who said her students had been wanting to know more about American history since the attacks, he said, "We need to de-exceptionalize the United States. We're just another country and another group of people."
Meet the professionals who are in charge of turning the nation's young into "effective citizens." These are the folks responsible for passing on "the content knowledge, intellectual skills, and civic values necessary for fulfilling the duties of citizenship in a participatory democracy," as their website has it. But entrusting this vital job to people like those who run the NCSS makes about as much sense as tapping Ralph Nader to administer NAFTA. Deeply cynical about the American idea, they lack the vaguest understanding of the Founders' vision of education as the wellspring of self-government.
In fact, Schulman's "de-exceptionalizing the United States" perfectly captures a core goal of the NCSS. Take a look at "Expectations of Excellence," the group's 1994 curriculum standards for social studies, widely followed by education authorities as they draft state standards and curricula around the country. "Thomas Jefferson, among others, emphasized that the vitality of a democracy depends upon the education and participation of its citizens," this statement begins promisingly. But what follows is a yawning list of "performance expectations," ranging from the obscure to the impenetrable, about culture, economics, technology, "continuity and change," and personal identity, that includes no American history, no major documents, and only a smattering of references to government at all.
Such references as there are to government--"Describe how public policies are used to address issues of public concern," for example--exist in some hazy realm of ur-citizenship that could apply to the Democratic Republic of Korea as easily as to our own. While it's true that high school students are expected to be able to "explain the origins and continuing influence of key ideals of the democratic republican form of government, such as human dignity, liberty, justice, equality, and the rule of law," this task is 78th in a series of 87, given no more salience than such pressing civic goals as knowing how to "construct reasoned judgments about specific cultural responses to persistent human issues" or how to "analyze the role of perceptions, attitudes, values, and beliefs in the development of personal identity."
Many states have embraced the NCSS's idea that you don't need to know any American history to be an effective citizen. Hawaii, Wisconsin, Arkansas, Maine, Michigan, and Minnesota, among others, use the NCSS guidelines as the model for their state social studies standards and thus require their students to study no history at all. The states that are developing strong history standards--notably Massachusetts, California, Texas, and Virginia--still confront the problem of finding teachers who can put them into practice. Many young people entering teaching today went to schools where, thanks in part to the influence of NCSS, their experience with American history was largely limited to reports on Sojourner Truth, dioramas of Navajo villages, and "reasoned judgments about specific cultural responses to persistent human issues."
