THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, November 14, 1994 TAG: 9411140043
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 69 lines
A debate is waxing nationwide over the merits of a two-volume guide on what to teach in American history to grades five through 12.
Few agree on the question, since the dead past is alive and in a state of constant revision.
Consider the changing view of the Indians, reflected in the new name, Native Americans. In childhood, they were the villains in cowboys and Indians, although, even then, I took the Indian role, thanks to a great-aunt who sided with them.
Dining with her in a restaurant that had a mural of Indians bringing food to Colonists, I said, ``Mamie, look at those nice Indians feeding the Colonists.''
``Yes,'' she said, ``and they should have killed every one of them!''
Which might have precluded our dining there, I noted - which didn't abate her wrath over injustices the Indians had suffered.
In this decade, we have been learning details of how Japanese Americans were confined in West Coast camps during World War II.
One phase of the debate on the history guides pits those who favor stressing heroes against others who focus on movements of masses. The best approach blends both.
In my grade school, the stress was on leaders shaping history as envisioned by the poet Longfellow:
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime.
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time.
The guide, wrought by the National Center for History in the Schools with advice from distinguished history professors, dwells on broad themes.
I tuned the other day to National Public Radio where Lynne Cheney, former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, which fostered the guide, was jousting with scholars.
Former Defense Secretary Dick Cheney must be intelligent, else she wouldn't have married him. (Interviewing her once, I asked whom she considered among the day's best orators. She most enjoyed listening to Jesse Jackson, she said, even when she disagreed.)
On the radio, she denounced the standards as ``politically correct to a fare-thee-well'' with six references to Harriet Tubman and only one to Robert E. Lee.
A Maryland slave unable to read or write, Tubman was forced to marry a fellow slave. She escaped to the North and, on 30 missions to the South, led 300 slaves to freedom and served as cook and scout with the Union Army. Her story lends insight into slavery and the abolitionist cause.
Lee, offered command of the Union Army, chose instead to follow Virginia into secession.
Former Gov. Colgate Darden observed that had Virginia established a school system advocated by Thomas Jefferson, a literate population would have had the sense to resist the pull to secede. Without Virginia and Lee's genius, the Confederacy would have collapsed in less than a year.
Masses or heroes?
It takes both.
It takes both kinds. ILLUSTRATION: B&W photo
A new history-teaching guide makes six references to Harriet Tubman,
above, and on to Robert E. Lee.
by CNB