Don’t know much about history…

Just read that California is going to require the teaching of gay history. Swell.

Not that I have any problem acknowledging that there were gay people doing significant things throughout history, just as there are today (although the concept of “gayness” is a recent development). My problem is with the breaking of history into smaller and smaller subsets, to the point where it’s just a bunch of pieces of tile, not a mosaic.

David McCullough, one of the finest popular historians ever to put pen to paper, had this to say on the subject:

"History is often taught in categories—women's history, African American history, environmental history — so that many of the students have no sense of chronology. They have no idea what followed what."

What's more, many textbooks have become "so politically correct as to be comic. Very minor characters that are currently fashionable are given considerable space, whereas people of major consequence farther back"—such as, say, Thomas Edison—"are given very little space or none at all."

In the sixth grade, my daughter spent a lot of time learning about Africa and did a project on Tanzania. She enjoyed it, learned a lot, did well on her project. But she hasn’t learned boo about how her own country works. What she knows, she’s learned from her parents.

I’m all for a broad perspective on the wide and wonderful world, but dammit, it is not xenophobic to expect your child to learn her own history first. Sorry, but it is much more important for her to understand the U.S. Constitution than it is for her to know about Tanzania.

The Department of Education’s 2010 National Assessment of Educational Progress found that only 12 percent of high-school seniors have a firm grasp of our nation's history. That's pathetic.

Most Americans don’t know in which century the Civil War occurred, much less anything about its causes and effects. Even fewer have any grasp of how the American economy developed or how the rights they take for granted were won.

Breaking history free of a fixation on the mainstream triumphalist narrative that dominated for many decades is a good thing. A great thing. But you can’t appreciate “A Renegade History of the United States” (which is wonderful, BTW) if you have no clue about what happened in the first place. If you don’t understand the narrative, a counter narrative or alternative narrative doesn’t have any resonance.

Unless there’s a grasp of the bigger picture, all the pieces of women’s history, African-American history, gay history or whatever, don’t have any context. They are rendered essentially meaningless.

When only 12 percent have a firm grasp of the subject, I’d say that we should stop worrying about teaching gay history and try just teaching history.

Jim Cornelius, Editor