Tell Me the Truth: Unlearning What We Think We Know
Tell Me the Truth: Unlearning What We Think We Know
When I was in junior high school, the movie Wayne's World came out. You probably know it. It's a comedy, an iconic product of the 90s, with numerous memorable moments and scenes. Phrases like “Party on!” and “We’re not worthy!” became everyday jokes. And of course there’s the unforgettable scene of the guys singing Bohemian Rhapsody in their car. (1)
Some time after the movie came out, a friend of my parents’ said, “You know that scene where they’re singing in the car? I heard that guy, Phil, he wasn’t even an actor. He was just some drunk dude they picked up off the street and he was so funny they kept him in the shot.” What? No! No way! we all laughed. “I swear,” Mike said. “Absolute truth.” I believed him, because I still believed adults back then. I believed that all adults told the truth always, especially to sponge-minded children who wanted to know everything about the world.
When I returned to school, the topic of Wayne’s World inevitably came up during my 8th grade English class. I eagerly repeated my secret insider knowledge, excitedly telling the class and our mustachioed teacher “Did you know Phil was just some random drunk guy they picked up off the street?” The whole room erupted into laughter. “You don’t actually believe that, do you?” I remember JB saying with total disdain. “God Stephanie, you’re so stupid.”
My face burned red with shame. I was furious that Mike lied to me, that he was joking without telling me he was joking. And I was disgusted with myself for being so gullible and believing him, and repeating it. A whole classroom of 13-year-olds pointing and laughing etched a scar onto my psyche. I felt so betrayed. I never trusted Mike again.
English was one of my better subjects. History, on the other hand, was not. In 10th grade, I took World History. Or maybe it was European History. See? I can’t even remember. In 11th grade I took US History, alongside many of my friends. Our teacher was a white man with spiky blond hair, who lived in town with his Spanish-speaking wife and their two young kids. From this class I remember: the phrase “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” being repeated daily; a heavy textbook of historical facts that I struggled to read but carried around anyway; taking copious notes during lectures because that’s what I needed to memorize for tests; and that Aaron Burr shot Alexander Hamilton—a fact made more memorable by the “Got Milk?” television ad(2) a few years prior, so that whenever it came up we all laughed and answered like we had mouthfuls of peanut butter—Aa-wah Baah!
A decade later, I was a graduate student at New York University, devoted to the subject of book publishing. It was there that I learned about educational publishing, and that every textbook that passed through my hands over the last 20 years had taken its own journey. I had believed that these textbooks, presented to me by an institution of learning, were vetted, truthful, and objective. Filled with irrefutable facts. I’d believed that what was taught to us in classrooms was objective truth, validated by teachers and professors who passed it on, repeated it, tested us on it.
Instead, I learned that textbooks were designed by individual school districts to include or exclude the information that the district wanted to teach its children. At the time of my learning, an important federal trial was taking place—Kitzmiller vs. Dover (3)—in which the town of Dover, Pennsylvania decided to modify any public school curriculum that contained language referring to evolution, calling it unproven, and suggesting the alternative (creationist) theory of “Intelligent Design” should also be taught to students. Despite the school board voting 6-3 in favor of this change, it was challenged by parents, teachers, and the ACLU.
My publishing class paid attention to this trial because it could impact textbook material changes in the upcoming years. Some 20 states in the US, like Texas, California, and Florida, adopt a single textbook for all public K-12 schools statewide, whereas the other 30 states let individual counties or districts make that decision.(4) But when you have a state as populous as Texas, with literally millions of public school students (5.3 million, presently), adopting a single textbook statewide gives that state a lot of purchasing power with the publishers from whom they obtain their books. A deal of that value means when the state says “We want to change the language around evolution,” or “We’d like an additional chapter about the heroes of the confederacy,” the publisher allows it. (As recently as 2018, the Texas State Board of Education voted to remove Helen Keller and Hillary Clinton, and remove Thomas Hobbes in exchange for Moses.(5))
Furthermore, neighboring states of smaller populations may share similar beliefs, and rather than make their own design changes, they simply adopt the “Texas edition” of a textbook and order millions of additional copies for their students. These states define their curriculum—often with political influence—then selectively build textbooks that correspond to it. It’s lucrative for the publisher to work this way, as they have for many years.
This was common even before the digital age, and often for non-political reasons, but technology made the process even more efficient. In 2008, a few years after the Dover decision, I began working at a major publisher, and my job was managing projects that digitized the content of textbooks, which then enabled those books to be used on “build your own textbook” applications for educators. Baseline content of the standard narrative was created by the book’s authors and editors, then meticulously tagged and labeled in technical syntax, allowing educators to make easy changes. Rewrite of page 26? No problem. Remove chapters 9-12? Just takes a mere click. Technology made the revision process even easier.
There is also a history in the United States of certain groups influencing which information remains in the mainstream in the first place. In one example that caught my attention, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) are credited with a post-Civil War campaign that championed an alternative narrative to the former confederate states. Since the 1890s, they’ve worked to erect statues of confederate “heroes” and push propaganda in the form of pamphlets and booklets that effectively sold the “Lost Cause”(6) that made the Civil War less about slavery, and more about an attack on states’ rights and their southern “way of life.” Worried that the confederate generation was aging and dying, the UDC doubled down to ensure that future generations remembered what their heroes were really fighting for. They even formed a textbook committee to ensure that any books introduced to students reflected southern values, not northern “misrepresentations,” of the war, and encouraged local libraries to remove or label with warnings any books that contradicted the agreed narrative.(7) “Reject a book that says the South fought to hold her slaves,” Mildred Lewis Rutherford wrote in 1920. “Reject a book that speaks of the slaveholder of the South as cruel and unjust to his slaves.” The UDC was very, very successful in this effort to change the narrative, and soon the Lost Cause was the primary account of the war throughout numerous school districts, one taught to multiple generations of students.
According to a piece by Ezra Klein(8), these UDC textbooks were in use up until the 1970s, though some scholars suggest it was even later. This means that many of the people we know, love, and are possibly arguing with today were raised in communities where these stories were taught as objective, neutral facts. For many, this is the only truth they’ve ever known, that their parents have ever known, that their grandparents have ever known. Their teachers learned it themselves in grade school, then grew up and taught it to the next generation. By one estimate, nearly 70 million public school students were educated with this information.(9)
Learning all of this made me feel like that gullible girl being laughed at in 8th grade English. If Civil War history can be rewritten, and evolution called “just a theory,” then what else in our textbooks has been omitted, withdrawn, or whitewashed? What IS the actual truth about the founding of the United States? Were the arriving Europeans courageous settlers, or were they violent colonizers? What other horrors have I not been taught about the institution of slavery? Were the Native Americans really unprovoked in their skirmishes? What is Christopher Columbus’ full story? You don’t actually believe that, do you? God Stephanie, you’re so stupid.
But it’s not about being stupid, as we’re wont to believe. And it’s not isolated to any one part of the country. This is a deep, powerful, effective installment of a winning white narrative. Why do all of our adopted educational textbooks leave out the Tulsa Massacre of 1921? Why is the relocation of indigenous people described as “voluntary” when their descendants call it the Trail of Tears? Why aren’t we taught about the bombs dropped on MOVE, a black liberation group, in Philadelphia in 1985?
For a long time, I really did believe that what was in our textbooks was an objective and neutral truth. It never occurred to me to question whether we were all learning the same things, or whether there was a political slant through which these stories could be told. And just like when I was a kid, my face burns with shame still today whenever I re-learn this lesson that after all these years of knowing the “truth” and repeating it, of casting judgements on people, of defining my own personal politics upon it—it was full of lies. Convenient tales told to shine a more authoritative, winning, flattering light on the origins and upholdings of this nation.
Now I have to question everything. We should all be questioning everything.
A few months ago, I saw my US history teacher at a family wedding. His son grew up and married my cousin a few years ago, so we occasionally crossed paths. “Come dance with me, Steph,” he said, smiling. He still had the same spiky blond hair. “What are you up to these days?” he asked as we swayed to the music.
“I’ve been doing a lot of genealogy research,” I told him. “Tracing my ancestors’ stories back to Sicily, to Ireland, through Canada to France and England.” I thought about my recent discovery, about members of my ancestral family in New England being kidnapped by native “savages” and held prisoner for over a year—perhaps as a direct response to my ancestors “clearing the land” that was already inhabited by this tribe in order to start a new white settlement. “It really makes you look at history differently, you know, when it’s your own people. Realizing that I can trace their lives because they were white and therefore counted, documented by name. Examining every historical event and policy on a micro-level, imagining their involvement in specific conflicts, or in genocides. I’m realizing that I have a lot—” I paused, worried I’d insult him. “...I have a lot to unlearn.”
“I know,” he sighed, with a sympathetic nod. “Me too, Steph. Me too.”
Footnotes/Additional Information:
(Which, even as I collect them, I can’t help but question their objectivity and accuracy.)
The Bohemian Rhapsody scene from Wayne’s World. https://youtu.be/thyJOnasHVE
Aaron Burr television ad from the Got Milk? campaign. https://youtu.be/OLSsswr6z9Y
ACLU documents of Dover case. https://www.aclu.org/other/trial-kitzmiller-v-dover
“State Textbook Adoption” by Educational Commision of the States, 2013. https://www.ecs.org/clearinghouse/01/09/23/10923.pdf
“Texas Board Votes to Eliminate Hillary Clinton, Helen Keller from History Curriculum,” by Lauren McGaughy, The Dallas Morning News, 2018. https://www.dallasnews.com/news/education/2018/09/14/texas-board-votes-to-eliminate-hillary-clinton-helen-keller-from-history-curriculum/
“How the 'Lost Cause' narrative became American history,” by the Washington Post, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y6luq3aUvc
A Measuring Rod to Test Text Books, and Reference Books in Schools, Colleges and Libraries, by Mildred Lewis Rutherford, 1920. via NARA. https://archive.org/details/measuringrodtot00ruth
“How Southern socialites rewrote Civil War history,” by Ezra Klein for Vox, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOkFXPblLpU
“TWISTED SOURCES: How Confederate propaganda ended up in the South's schoolbooks,” by Greg Huffman, 2019. https://www.facingsouth.org/2019/04/twisted-sources-how-confederate-propaganda-ended-souths-schoolbooks