(Name-mce) ListServ Florida's Lawmakers Puts Historians On Notice

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Perhaps this is of interest to some NAME members.
 

Florida's Lawmakers Puts Historians On Notice

"Nothing But The  Facts" 
By ROBERT JENSEN   
http://www.counterpunch.com/Jensen07202006.html

One way to measure  the fears of people in power is by the intensity of their 
quest for control over  knowledge.

By that standard, the members of the Florida Legislature  marked themselves 
as the folks most terrified of history in the United States  when last month 
they took bold action to become the first state to outlaw  historical 
interpretation in public schools. In other words, Florida has  officially replaced the 
study of history with the imposition of dogma and  effectively outlawed 
critical thinking. 

Although U.S. students are  typically taught a sanitized version of history 
in which the inherent  superiority and benevolence of the United States is 
rarely challenged, the  social and political changes unleashed in the 1960s have 
opened up some space  for a more honest accounting of our past. But even these 
few small steps taken  by some teachers toward collective critical 
self-reflection are too much for  many Americans to bear.

So, as part of an education bill signed into law  by Gov. Jeb Bush, Florida 
has declared that “American history shall be viewed as  factual, not as 
constructed.” That factual history, the law states, shall be  viewed as “knowable, 
teachable and testable.” 

Florida’s lawmakers are  not only prescribing a specific view of U.S. history 
that must be taught (my  favorite among the specific commands in the law is 
the one about instructing  students on “the nature and importance of free 
enterprise to the United States  economy”), but are trying to legislate out of 
existence any ideas to the  contrary. They are not just saying that their history 
is the best history, but  that it is beyond interpretation. In fact, the law 
attempts to suppress  discussion of the very idea that history is 
interpretation. 

The  fundamental fallacy of the law is in the underlying assumption that “
factual”  and “constructed” are mutually exclusive in the study of history. 
There  certainly are many facts about history that are widely, and sometimes even  
unanimously, agreed upon. But how we arrange those facts into a narrative to  
describe and explain history is clearly a construction, an interpretation.  
That’s the task of historians -- to assess factual assertions about the past,  
weave them together in a coherent narrative, and construct an explanation of 
how  and why things happened.   

For example, it’s a fact that  Europeans began coming in significant numbers 
to North America in the 17th  century. Were they peaceful settlers or 
aggressive invaders? That’s  interpretation, a construction of the facts into a 
narrative with an argument  for one particular way to understand those facts.  

It’s also a fact  that once those Europeans came, the indigenous people died 
in large numbers. Was  that an act of genocide? Whatever one’s answer, it will 
be an interpretation, a  construction of the facts to support or reject that 
conclusion.   In  contemporary history, has U.S. intervention in the Middle 
East been aimed at  supporting democracy or controlling the region’s crucial 
energy resources? Would  anyone in a free society want students to be taught that 
there is only one way  to construct an answer to that question?   

Speaking of  contemporary history, what about the fact that before the 2000 
presidential  election, Florida’s Republican secretary of state removed  57,700 
names  from the voter rolls, supposedly because they were convicted felons 
and not  eligible to vote. It’s a fact that at least 90 percent were not 
criminals -- but  were African American. It’s a fact that black people vote 
overwhelmingly  Democratic. What conclusion will historians construct from those facts 
about how  and why that happened?

In other words, history is always constructed, no  matter how much Florida’s 
elected representatives might resist the notion. The  real question is: How 
effectively can one defend one’s construction? If Florida  legislators felt the 
need to write a law to eliminate the possibility of that  question even being 
asked, perhaps it says something about their faith in their  own view and 
ability to defend it.  One of the bedrock claims of the  scientific revolution and 
the Enlightenment -- two movements that, to date, have  not been repealed by 
the Florida Legislature -- is that no interpretation or  theory is beyond 
challenge. The evidence and logic on which all knowledge claims  are based must be 
transparent, open to examination. We must be able to  understand and critique 
the basis for any particular construction of knowledge,  which requires that 
we understand how knowledge is constructed.

Except in  Florida.

But as tempting as it is to ridicule, we should not spend too  much time 
poking fun at this one state, because the law represents a yearning  one can find 
across the United States. Americans look out at a wider world in  which more 
and more people reject the idea of the United States as always right,  always 
better, always moral. As the gap between how Americans see themselves and  how 
the world sees us grows, the instinct for many is to eliminate intellectual  
challenges at home: “We can’t control what the rest of the world thinks, but 
we  can make sure our kids aren’t exposed to such nonsense.”  

The irony  is that such a law is precisely what one would expect in a 
totalitarian society,  where governments claim the right to declare certain things to 
be true, no  matter what the debates over evidence and interpretation. The 
preferred  adjective in the United States for this is “Stalinist,” a system to 
which U.S.  policymakers were opposed during the Cold War. At least, that’s 
what I learned  in history class.   

People assume that these kinds of  buffoonish actions are rooted in the 
arrogance and ignorance of Americans, and  there certainly are excesses of both in 
the United States.  

But the  Florida law -- and the more widespread political mindset it reflects 
-- also has  its roots in fear. A track record of relatively successful 
domination around the  world seems to have produced in Americans a fear of any 
lessening of that  dominance. Although U.S. military power is unparalleled in 
world history, we  can’t completely dictate the shape of the world or the course 
of events. Rather  than examining the complexity of the world and expanding the 
scope of one’s  inquiry, the instinct of some is to narrow the inquiry and 
assert as much  control as possible to avoid difficult and potentially painful 
challenges to  orthodoxy.  

Is history “knowable, teachable and testable”?  Certainly people can work 
hard to know -- to develop interpretations of  processes and events in history 
and to understand competing interpretations. We  can teach about those views. 
And students can be tested on their understanding  of conflicting constructions 
of history.  

But the real test is  whether Americans can come to terms with not only the 
grand triumphs but also  the profound failures of our history. At stake in that 
test is not just a grade  in a class, but our collective future.

Robert Jensen is a journalism  professor at the University of Texas at Austin 
and board member of the Third  Coast Activist Resource Center  
<http://thirdcoastactivist.org/>http://thirdcoastactivist.org/. He is the  author of The 
Heart of Whiteness: Race, Racism, and White Privilege and Citizens  of the 
Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (both from City Lights Books).  He can be 
reached at  <mailto:rjensen at uts.cc.utexas.edu>rjensen at uts.cc.utexas.edu.




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