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...cultures. Fundamental conflicts values and vision--culture wars--are very much with us today.
One of the first salvos in our domestic culture war was fired by Lynne Cheney, the former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In a 1994 op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal entitled "The End of History," Cheney launched a preemptive attack on a set of as-yet-unpublished advisory standards for the teaching of American history in our schools. That the battle was joined over the teaching of history is no accident: the story of who we have been is necessarily the story of who we are and what we value. Turks and Armenians, Kurds and Iraqis, Palestinians and Israelis all see the common events of their histories through dramatically different lenses, and such disparate visions make compromise and accommodation more difficult. A common ground on which cultural conflict over history could be resolved thus promises to be a useful thing.
Under the advisory standards that Cheney criticized, students were to be challenged with historical questions ("Was the atomic bomb used to shorten the war? Or was it done for political reasons?") and given arguments and primary documents from both sides, thus encouraging them to make up their own minds. Such an approach nurtures critical thinking, evaluation of sources, tentative conclusions, and a host of other worthy educational goals, while requiring students to become producers, rather than passive consumers, of their historical understanding.
But for Cheney and neoconservative commentators like Rush Limbaugh, this approach promised a dangerous, nation-threatening loss. As they saw it, history is the nursemaid to citizenship. It American citizens were not to be taught a particular and laudatory metanarrative about their history--the story of American ex-ceptionalism with its heroic sweep of ambition, statesmanship, and accomplishment--much mischief would ensue. For conservatives, the traditional narrative is a necessary foundation of American political life.
But had the standards writers ignored the contributions of ethnic, minority, and revisionist historians, they would have been guilty of professional malfeasance. And their pedagogic goal was worthy: they wanted students to understated that history is a lively conversation, one to which the present always brings its own concerns, obsessions, assumptions, and values. History is not simply...
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