The Sobol report:
multiculturalism triumphant
By Heather Mac Donald
The emerging line of defense in the debate over
multiculturalism is the charge of “exaggeration.”
Multiculturalists accuse their critics and the press of overstating
the movement’s impact and distorting its demands. The opposite is the
case. Years before multiculturalism became controversial, its
advocates were introducing racial quotas into history writing and
literary studies. Public awareness has yet to catch up with the
extent to which high-school and college education have already been
transformed.
More critically, those who mediate between the activists and
the public —the press, educators, and administrators—regularly
muffle the more radical aspects of the multiculturalist platform in
a blanket of normalizing rhetoric. This ill-conceived diplomacy
results in a gap between the public face and the reality of
multiculturalism. The debate has been presented
in terms of how many pages a history textbook should devote to Cree
culture, as opposed to the Bill of Rights, when what hangs in the
balance
is our culture’s commitment to rationalism and objective
standards of knowledge.
A prime example of the repackaging of multicultural extremism
as moderate academic reform is the public presentation of the Sobol
Committee Report. The Sobol Committee was appointed in 1990 by New
York State’s Education Commissioner, Thomas Sobol, to review the
state’s history and social-studies curricula. It was widely
understood that the impetus behind the review was the demand to
make New York’s curriculum more multicultural—the present
committee was formed after its predecessor issued a diatribe
against Eurocentric education that was too extreme for even the
liberal Regents to stomach. The committee presented its findings
to New York’s Board of Regents in June of 1991; in July, the
Regents adopted its recommendations.
The committee’s work received extensive coverage in The New York
Times. A careful reader of our newspaper of record would have come
away with the following impressions of the report and its subject
matter: First, that the report represents “a new emphasis on
multicultural education.” While the rest of society has been
learning to value non-Eurocentric points of view, New York’s history
and social-science curricula, it seems, have remained largely untouched by
multiculturalism: in Troy and Schenectady, Columbus still
“discovers” America. The Times’s coverage left the
impression that a new curricular era was dawning in which
New York would finally recognize America’s
cultural diversity, and, in the words of one of the drafters, no
longer force individuals to “sacrifice their ethnic identity to be
educated.”
Second, the Times conveyed the idea that the report itself is judicious
in its diagnosis and reasonable in its remedies, avoiding the racial
virulence of the earlier report while paving the way for much-needed
change. According to the Times’s reporter, its “recommendations seem
relatively innocuous.” The Times’s editorialists praised the
committee as “scholarly and balanced,” and reassured their readers
that the report “offers mostly reasonable remedies.” Adopting the
terminology of one of the report’s two dissenters, historian Arthur
M. Schlesinger, Jr., of the Graduate Center of City University of
New York, the Times framed the central issue confronting the
committee as finding the proper balance between “pluribus” and
“unum”—between, that is, cultural diversity and cultural unity.
Unlike Schlesinger, however, the paper concluded that the
balance had been struck. In fact, the committee had transcended
the apparent zero-sum relation between diversity and unity to give
us “more pluribus [and] more unum.”
[1]
The Times’s coverage fits the archetypal narrative pattern
of an eruption of disorder followed by the restoration of order.
After the first Sobol Committee’s report was rejected, it was all
but inevitable that the second’s would be greeted as the very soul
of moderation. However aesthetically satisfying such a denouement
may be, in the present instance it is a complete whitewash. The
report is radically incoherent. It contradicts itself on nearly
every page. Far from representing a “new emphasis on multicultural
education,” it duplicates a series of reforms that, according to
the report itself, have already wreaked havoc on the curriculum.
Rather than balancing unity and diversity, as the Times claimed, the
report pays only lip service to the value of cultural cohesion.
It invokes America’s democratic ideals rarely, in boiler-plate,
and only as a prelude to criticizing their imperfect realization.
But the most disturbing aspect of the report does not even
register on the Times’s “pluribus-unum” scales, and is barely
alluded to by the paper. The committee proposes unleashing on
schoolchildren the
relativist theory of knowledge currently in
vogue in higher education. This proposal would only increase the
already legendary ignorance of American students while providing a
fancy theoretical justification for it.
The Times’s presentation of the Sobol report typifies the
response of the liberal elite to the demands of academic and
political extremists. The establishment shrinks from pointing out
the logical contradictions, racist assumptions, and
misrepresentations in those demands, for fear of being branded
racist itself. That fear has resulted in minority-hiring quotas in
universities and the professions even though there
are insufficient or no qualified minority candidates to fill those
quotas; it has given us institutionalized segregation
on campus in the form of
separate racial student centers, dormitories, graduation
ceremonies, and academic programs; and it has led to
racial tests of fitness for
teaching. It also induces
the press to bury racial or racist aspects
of current events when those events might reflect poorly on
minorities, as witness the coverage of recent riots in
the Adams Morgan section of Washington, D.C.,
and in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights.
The Sobol Committee report opens on a note of alarm:
“By most acceptable standards of fairness and equitable treatment
of the many cultural currents in our nation, the existing syllabi
are found wanting.” The tone is measured, but the message is
urgent, and the condemnation sweeping. New York’s curriculum
embodies a model of cultural assimilation that is no longer
acceptable. That model “required” people to “shed their
specific
cultural differences in order to be considered American.” This
forced assimilation may once have been necessary “to shape a
unified nation.” But the civil-rights struggle, the increase in
non-European immigration over the last two decades, and the
“recognition of our nation’s indigenous heritage” have “put [the
goal of unification] in question.” (The report does not explain
why a unified nation is any less important today than before the
Sixties.) It may come as a surprise to students of the American
Constitution, but it is thanks solely to multiculturalism that we are
“progressing … toward a … respect for pluralism.” It is in
spite, not because, of “mainstream cultural ideals commonly
identified as American” that “recent decades” have
witnessed the emergence of
“a more tolerant, inclusive, and realistic vision of American
identity.”
Unfortunately, the report continues,
New York’s curriculum has yet to respond to
this breakthrough in democratic values. Its failure to do so has
serious educational consequences. The “lack of attention to …
diversity and the absence of referents to one’s indigenous culture
in the curriculum” make “the problems of teaching and learning
[geography and history] more difficult.”
The committee therefore calls
on the state “to inaugurate a curriculum that reflects the rich
cultural diversity of the nation.”
The report’s drafters apparently believe that frequent
repetition is an adequate substitute for corroborating evidence.
Having stated their claim that New York’s curriculum fails to
reflect cultural diversity, they repeat it at least once per page
of a sixty-odd-page report. But the examples of the curriculum’s
alleged insensitivity to cultural diversity are so few and so
trivial as to undermine the charge they are intended to support.
The most egregious examples of cultural bias are definitional:
the use of “Oriental” instead of “Asian,” “slave” instead of
“enslaved person,” the incorporation of Northern Africa into the
Middle East, and the occasional use of “Latin America” without the
qualification that many Latin American nations “trace their
traditions” to Africa, India, and Indonesia.
The report also alleges, without supporting evidence, that the
curriculum “inadequately addresses” the loss of lives and culture
due to the European colonization of Africa, and that the pre-colonial
history of India is “not properly treated.” The “focus on
celebrations such as Thanksgiving and Columbus Day” in grades
kindergarten through 6 shows “disregard
… for indigenous
peoples.” The discussions of slavery “frequently omit [its]
economic basis,” and the syllabi for grades 7–8 and 11 “do not
adequately address the incarceration of Japanese Americans” or
the deportation of Mexicans in the 1920s. The solution to these
curricular enormities is to study “the shortcomings
of U.S. policy.”
The final examples of Eurocentrism and other forbidden “isms”
require an exquisite sensitivity to slur.
The syllabi describe the African continent as possessing
“few jungle environments” and consisting of “nearly 45 …
desert or dry steppe,” while Western Europe’s environment is
described as “exhibit[ing] great diversity in terms of physical
geography and climate, [with] easy access to warm water ports.”
These formulations
“betray … real
bias.” The statement in the curriculum that “[i]nventions … in the
19th century were often the product of individual genius
. . . , including that
of lesser known, minority inventors,” and the recommendation that
students “also examine the roles of women and racial/ethnic
minorities” in labor history are racist and sexist, according to the
Sobol Committee, because they
imply “that all the remaining content must not be about
. . . women and people of color.”
This last objection poses quite a dilemma. If the only
acceptable histories are those which are “about” women and
people of color, then either we’re going to have a drastically
slimmed-down history curriculum or we will have to rewrite history
entirely from the perspective of those groups. That such a
perspective will radically alter the past goes without saying.
Since an analysis of the drafting and ratifying of
the U.S. Constitution would “not be about” women and people of
color, would it belong in a multicultural curriculum? Likely one
could slip it in via the diary of a delegate’s wife, or by focusing
on the slavery question. But finding a multicultural hook for the
doings of other dead white males will not always be so easy.
The hair-splitting quality of the examples suggests
that the allegations of Eurocentric bias and cultural
exclusion in New York’s curriculum are unfounded. Most of the
criticism is directed at the depth of treatment of multicultural
topics, not at their exclusion.
But the amazing thing about the Sobol report is that it
refutes itself. It explicitly contradicts its central thesis that
New York’s curriculum lacks a multicultural perspective. It
acknowledges that the Regents have issued an annual statement
supporting multicultural education for the last twenty years, and
that the curriculum was completely overhauled in 1989 in accordance
with the multicultural imperative. So successful were those most
recent revisions that the curriculum simply buckled under the
additional weight. The curriculum now contains “too much subject
matter.” It presents “ever-increasing amounts of information,
without adequate organizing and supporting frameworks.”
There is a certain poignancy in the authors’ account of their
self-created dilemma. To correct the “tendency to tell the story
of U.S. and global history from the perspective of males and
whites, … we quickly began to add important information about
women and people of color.” But then the multicultural principle
backfired: “We must [then] in fairness go to [sic] lists of
contributions of the many other national, ethnic, religious,
cultural and other groups; and as we did so, it became clear that
this encyclopedic approach would never fit in the syllabus, let
alone the classroom.” Though one may be sure that the
multicultural principle was never taken to so absurd a length as to
encompass Western European “ethnic, religious, and cultural
groups,” its application to more politically correct groups
defeated its own purpose: “It [did] not serve the fundamental goal
of helping students of all backgrounds and abilities understand and
appreciate the concept of cultural diversity within national
identity. In this sense, the information-dominant approach to
the social studies curriculum fails as a vehicle for multicultural
education in the same way it fails in a full treatment of any other
topic.”
The picture of an already overloaded multicultural curriculum
that emerges from the Sobol Committee report matches the
conclusions reached in 1983 by Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer
and Tufts historian Reed Ueda. In a study of six major American-history
textbooks, Ethnic Groups in History Textbooks, Glazer
and Ueda exploded the myth that textbooks remain bastions of
Eurocentrism. They found that blacks and Hispanics received over
four times as much coverage as European immigrant groups, which are
treated as a monolithic entity. African and Native American
civilizations are portrayed as creative, in harmony with nature,
peaceful, and cooperative, whereas European cultures are vicious
and aggressive. The authors charged that by representing the
United States as “exploitative, unequal, and almost unredeemable in
its general nastiness,” the typical multicultural textbook obscures
the “considerable institutional and social achievements of the
American polity.” Were the study conducted
today, its conclusions would only be bleaker.
The report’s answer to the educational failure created by
multiculturalism’s success is breathtaking in its simplicity.
Since it is impossible to master all the gender, race, ethnic, and
sexual information that multiculturalism suddenly makes relevant to
world history, the solution is obvious—discard the mastery of
information as one of education’s goals: “It is recommended that
the approach to the social studies, K-12, shift the emphasis from
the mastery of information to the development of fundamental tools,
concepts, and intellectual processes that make people learners who
can approach knowledge in a variety of ways and struggle with the
contradictions.” Rather than calling into question the use of
education as therapy, the panel rejects
whatever in the traditional concept of education is incompatible
with that use. The authors assert that their educational program
is motivated not by expediency, but by profound epistemological
changes: “The nature of our knowledge and the criteria for being
judged an educated person are changing. … [W]e are beginning
to realize that understanding and the ability to appreciate things
from more than one perspective may be as important as is factual
knowledge in the goals of education.”
There is much that is ludicrous in this proposal. Surely
foremost is the recommendation that in an age when Americans’ ignorance
of history and geography is nearly complete, schools de-emphasize
the “mastery of information” even further. The report is a
textbook case of rationalizing the real: since students know
nothing anyway, let’s declare that the mission of education is not
the acquisition of knowledge, but rather the “development
of fundamental tools,” etc.
But almost equally silly is the notion that grammar- and high-school
students are ready to sit down with the high priests of
poststructuralism and postmodernism for a big meal of linguistic
skepticism and epistemological relativism: “The subject matter
content should be treated as socially constructed and therefore
tentative—as is all knowledge.” Eight- and fourteen-year-olds want answers to their questions; after being
told a few times that there are no answers, but just different
social constructs, they will stop asking questions in the first
place.
The Times barely alluded to the committee’s recommendation
that our schools shift from “information-based” to
“conceptual” education. The
two co-chairmen, psychologist Edmund W. Gordon of Yale
University
and Francis Roberts, Superintendent of Schools, Cold Springs Harbor
School District, considered it important enough, however, to merit
fuller treatment in a separate statement appended to the
report.
Gordon and Roberts argue that knowledge of history (or, as
they disparagingly put it, “consensus history”) is not an
“intellectual competency” necessary for democratic government. Nor
is “training in established traditions, values and beliefs.”
Rather, a civic education should “occur in the context of exposure
to diverse opinions, multiple perspectives and situated histories,
where the learning tasks involve comparative analysis, contextual
validation, heuristic exploration and judicious reflection.”
It is not easy to guess what this prescription might mean for, say, a
fifth-grade teacher of the Civil War. But there is no ambiguity
about what the report is ruling out—an intensive study of the
history of liberal democracy.
Gordon and Roberts’s claim that such a study is not necessary
for democratic participation is dangerously wrong. Constitutional
government is not self-sustaining. It requires citizens to preserve it.
But the concepts of the rule of
law, limited government, and individual rights cannot be fully
understood or appreciated apart from their history. People with
little or no knowledge of how those concepts emerged from the
tradition of absolute monarchy are less than ideal guardians.
Gordon and Roberts acknowledge that not everyone on the Sobol
Committee shared the majority’s low opinion of “hegemonic”
knowledge: “Although we were generally in agreement that histories
tend to reflect the interests and perspectives of those who write
them, there was a ubiquitous undercurrent of concern for the
recognition of historical and other truth.” Such
“undercurrents,”
however antiquated and regrettable, pose an obstacle to the march
of multiculturalism: “It may well be that it is this concern for
truth that will be most difficult to reconcile with our conception
of education as being directed at the development of intellect and
understanding.” Multiculturalism, in other words, is incompatible with a
commitment to truth and knowledge. The two co-chairmen explain the
problem with “facts [and] knowledge structures”: they are
“insufficient and often so situation-bound as to limit their
utility in understanding and problem-solving.”
We have seen what
such jettisoning of “facts and knowledge” leads to
in practice. Many people, including attorney William Kunstler, held
that it was irrelevant whether Tawana Brawley had actually been
abducted and raped by a group of white men—the fact that the story
had “contextual validity” and was compatible with the “situated
knowledge” of many blacks was sufficient to confer
upon it political power. A similar indifference to fact spurred
the rioting in Crown Heights in 1991 over the death of a black child
struck by a motorcade escorting the Hassidic Grand Rabbi. The
rioters asserted that the child was ignored by both city and Jewish
paramedics, but neutral eyewitnesses confirmed that the child did
receive medical help at the scene of the accident. The rioters
chose to ignore that evidence, because the charge that Jews had
received preferential treatment and were indifferent to black
suffering matched rioters’ preconceptions, or, in the terminology of
the Sobol report, their “interests and perspectives.”
In 1989, a New York Regent, Adelaide L. Sanford, accused
current Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch of having
grandparents who owned African slave ships. Ravitch informed
Sanford that her grandparents were poor Jews in Poland, not ship
owners. Rather than apologizing for the slur, Sanford defended it
on the ground that she was “speaking ethnically.” Truth does not
matter when ethnicity is at play.
The growing popularity of conspiracy theories among blacks to
explain the spread of AIDS, drugs, and violence in the inner city
also reveals a willingness to substitute one’s “situated
knowledge”—i.e., ideologically motivated conjecture—for facts.
These cases reveal a frightening chasm between white and black
standards of credible evidence, refutation, and verification. The
Sobol Committee’s disdain for facts
can only open that chasm wider. Though the report
offers relativism as a way of defusing racial tensions and
increasing understanding between cultures, in fact relativism can only
exacerbate such tensions. In denigrating the appeal to objective
truth as a relic of outmoded thinking or a tool of hegemonic
control, the report destroys the only ground on which cultural
mistrust and animosities can be resolved—reason. If reason is denied,
the only way to resolve disputes is through physical or political force.
There is considerable incongruity between the
committee’s educational and political philosophy on the one hand, and
its exercise of power on the other. Though it endlessly reiterates
its commitment to
“diversity” and its opposition to “hegemonic”
knowledge and power,
in practice it has little tolerance for differing views and local
autonomy. The committee displays the usual multiculturalist disdain
for local school boards and teachers, whom it accuses of derailing the
multicultural agenda. To keep unruly school boards in line, it
demands that all adopt a resolution in favor of
multiculturalism. The boards must also institute “attitude”-retraining
programs for staff at all levels, including bus drivers and
clerical workers. Such programs would inculcate “attitudes
supportive of the proposed changes” such as “the beliefs that (a)
diversity is desirable, [and] (b) both the content and the process
of teaching should reflect and respond to diversity.”
In other words, the committee denies local school boards their ability to
determine the needs of their student population. Though the report
justifies multiculturalism as a way for students to “recognize the
fullness of their identity and heritage,” it demands that
“districts [of] predominantly one culture” adopt the multicultural
curriculum as well.
The proposal to shift from an “information-based” to a
“conceptual” education has at least the advantage of being so vague
and hedged round by contradictions that it is likely to founder in
execution. But the report contains another proposal that is perhaps
an even more ominous threat to education, for it is much easier to
implement. The committee takes aim not just at the content of
textbooks, but at their very role in the classroom: A
“multicultural education with multiple perspectives requires that
we … move away from focusing on textbooks as the major
sources, a practice that unfortunately treats other, non-text
materials as supplementary rather than essential.”
Among the “non-text materials” which are now to be put
on a par with books are “pictures and posters, updated maps that
accurately portray the sizes of land masses, videos, music, books
that are not texts, inexpensive artifacts and woven materials.”
It is a revelation to learn that Western cartography has been
inaccurately portraying land masses all these years. “Inexpensive artifacts”
and “woven materials” are undoubtedly euphemisms for African crafts
of the sort which a consultant to the Sobol Committee Georgia State University
educational psychologist Asa Hilliard III peddles at
conferences on Afrocentric education. It is unlikely that samples
of eighteenth-century brocades from Lyons will be an integral part
of the multicultural classroom; Surinam quilts could well be.
Note that the report does not call for the introduction of
these non-text materials into the classroom. Apparently their role
in the curriculum is already secure and merely needs bolstering.
The committee offers no rationale for this proposal (to which
the Times devotes only one line) to elevate “non-text materials” to
the status of books. But the denigration of the book is already official
policy among the politically correct. The 1992 president of the Modern
Language Association, University of Pennsylvania professor Houston Baker,
views reading and writing as “technologies of control,” and charges
that literacy perpetuates “Western hegemonic arrangements of
knowledge.” It is difficult to decide which is more surreal—the
head of the nation’s literature professors trashing reading or the
leaders of a barely literate school population adopting a proposal
to replace the already spectral presence of books in the classroom
with videos and other amusements.
From a multicultural perspective, there are several
problems with books. First, the West’s principal philosophical and
political ideas have been transmitted by writing.
If you want to
suppress Western culture, you’ve got to start with the book. Books
play a far less important role, if any, in the Native American and
African cultures which have been nominated to supplant Western
dominance. The second problem with books is that minorities have an even
harder time reading them than whites. On the same principle that
rejects as biased tests on which minorities score lower than
whites, there must be something wrong with reading, if illiteracy
among blacks and Hispanics is high. Rather than requiring more
reading to correct the problem, we destroy the offending evidence
so that we can perpetuate the myth of absolute equality of
achievement among the races and cultures.
Unfortunately, the recommendation to de-emphasize books is
almost superfluous. Textbooks have already mutated into something
akin to the “non-text materials” that the report champions.
Pictures have replaced narrative—in the books Glazer and Ueda
examined, no two consecutive pages of text lacked an illustration.
In an otherwise sympathetic review of California’s 1991 textbook
revisions, a reporter for The New York Times’s Sunday
magazine compared the look of the new multicultural textbooks to
USA Today.
How will the substitution of “woven materials and inexpensive
artifacts” for books, of “situational concepts” for facts, and of
gender and disability studies for American political history affect
the knowledge and skills of New York’s students? We will never
know for sure. The report calls for the development of
“appropriate and relevant assessment procedures” that are
“supportive of the goals and purposes of the revised social
sciences curriculum, and reflective of the diversity of the student
population.” In other words, testing procedures, too, must conform
to the multicultural agenda. They must be purged of anything that
smacks of Western imperialism and racism, such as the valuation of
literacy, communication skills, rationality, and historical
knowledge. Instead, assessment procedures should measure both
“canonical and non-canonical knowledge and techniques” and
“identify from indigenous experiences examples of core concepts,
knowledge and skills.” Translation: Knowledge of the Odyssey is
out; knowledge of, say, how to navigate your way around the streets
of Bed-Stuy is in. Tests must assess “competence in knowledge,
skill and understanding that is not dependent on communicative
competence in a single language.” Translation: Don’t worry about
learning standard English—double negations and the lack of
subject–verb agreement will do just fine.
These vague prescriptions set the stage for a reprise of the
charade that has recently played itself out again and again. Any
test that yields a politically
unpalatable result must be revised until it yields the proper one. In
the process, the definition of essential knowledge inevitably
changes. Our society has turned the purpose of testing completely
on its head. We no longer use tests to evaluate achievement or
competence for a position, but rather to rubber-stamp a result
pre-ordained by politics. As our population grows ever more illiterate
and uneducated, tests, too, will be dumbed down to conceal that
fact. It would be a lot cheaper to simply do away with testing
altogether and openly institute the quotas for which tests now
front.
One of the most puzzling and disheartening events in the wake
of the Sobol report is the role of Nathan Glazer as
apologist for the academic Left. Glazer served on the Sobol
Committee, a position for which his classic study of American
ethnicity, Beyond the Melting Pot (1963), co-authored with
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and his 1983 study of multiculturalism
eminently qualified him. But the Glazer of those two works bears
little resemblance to the Glazer that emerged after the report.
Reading Glazer’s preface to the second edition of Beyond the
Melting Pot (1970) is like entering a time warp. He decries
the complicity of the white intelligentsia in the self-defeating
demands of black militants, such as the dismantling of the
meritocratic admissions system at City College. Long before the
ironies of the blacks-only schools movement, he warns against
rejecting the Northern model of ethnic incorporation in favor of
Southern separatism. While acknowledging the right to celebrate
black culture, he finds the refusal to participate in the common state
“frightening.” And
while granting that there is a place for ethnic studies as a form
of self-celebration and group reassurance, he calls for “a true,
historical, sociological effort.”
By the time of the Sobol Committee report, a transformation in
Glazer’s outlook seems to have occurred. He had initially planned to dissent
from the report, but ultimately signed on and appended a comment
instead. Adopting the Times’s approach, he praises the report
for having avoided the extremes of “forceful Americanization and
assimilation” on the one hand and a “parcelling out of American
history into a different and incompatible story for each group” on
the other. His acknowledgment that “the first danger is scarcely
a present one” is quite an understatement. Merely to raise “forceful
Americanization” as a possibility
resurrects the very myth about Eurocentric curricular bias that
Glazer’s own research exploded.
Glazer’s only misgiving about the report is that it “offers
some support” to the “danger of the hypostatization of race,
ethnic group, culture, people.”
Glazer’s upbeat evaluation of the report is a far cry from his
earlier debunking of the multiculturalist platform. But his
comments still leave one unprepared for his article in the
September 2, 1991, New Republic, subtitled, “Why the Sobol
Commission Was Right.” Glazer there abandons principle in favor
of political accommodation.
He adopts the position that if enough people are clamoring
for a policy, however misguided, it would be churlish to oppose it
on such weak grounds as educational excellence or a respect for
history.
The article is a strange mix of honesty and complacency. He
points out that the real impetus for multiculturalism is the low
academic and economic achievement of American blacks.
Multiculturalism has few advocates among immigrant groups, who
would for the most part be content with the Anglo-American
education that past immigrants received.
Glazer admits outright that “in the big cities, in many
schools, an unbalanced, indeed distorted view of American and world
history is prevailing.” His response to that distortion is to
shrug his shoulders and invoke demographics:
[W]hen set against the reality of majorities of black and Latino
students in these schools, the political dominance of black and
Latino administrators, the weak preparation of teachers and
administrators in history, and the responsiveness of textbook
administrators to organized pressure, the weight of the truth of
history, as determined by the best scholars, is reduced to only one
interest.
Glazer justifies caving in to the distortion of history on the ground
that history “has always played a socializing, nationalizing
function.”
But even if such a function was accomplished by known
distortions in the past, that is no reason to tolerate them today.
Glazer poses the question: “What does one do in the face of
these [demographic and political] trends?”, and answers: “One thing
is to fight the errors, distortions, untruths, imbalances,” as did
“some of the comments attached to the report.” He is obviously not
very impressed by that option. He castigates the “sharper critics
of the report” for “fail[ing] to recognize that demographic and
political pressures change the history that is to be taught.”
It is unlikely, however, that the two dissenters,
Professor Schlesinger and historian Kenneth T. Jackson of Columbia,
are blind to the demographic changes that are fueling the
rewriting of history.
For those of us who are not so easy with the prospect of
rewriting history to suit the alleged emotional needs of
minorities, Glazer offers the following consolation: “While
multiculturalism and Afrocentrism race ahead in some schools and
systems, others may happily continue to be the schools many of us
remember and approve of, with only some modest modifications to
prepare students for tests with a surprisingly high content of
questions dealing with blacks and women, and particularly black
women.” This solution borders on the cynical. If one version of
history is truer to fact than another, why should only some
children be exposed to it, while others receive convenient myth?
And such disparate presentations of history guarantee an
explosive clash in the future.
Some students are learning that Graeco-Roman civilization was
pilfered from “black” Egypt. When they discover
that the rest of society thinks otherwise, will they, in
the spirit of the Sobol report, attribute the difference to
“multiple perspectives and situated histories”? Unlikely.
Instead, they will see a racist conspiracy, and their alienation
will only grow.
If this promise of a dual educational system fails to satisfy,
Glazer tries a stronger claim:
The skeletal structure [of American
history] will remain, because we still live under the polity
established by the Constitution, and it is in that polity, under
that Constitution, that racial and ethnic and minority groups and
women seek to expand their rights. It will be quite a job to keep
nonsense and exaggeration and mindless ethnic and racial
celebration out of the schools, but the basic structure of
instruction in history will survive.
Glazer assumes that because the groups advocating revisionist
history avail themselves of constitutional rights, they will
somehow be either unable or unwilling to alter American history.
But the more extreme of the Afrocentrists
are hostile to the American polity and the Constitution, so even if
they are “in it,” how does that limit their ability to rewrite
history? The only limits on that ability are political. If the
multiculturalists amass enough power, they could find not just
Iroquois but Egyptian influence on the Constitution.
However dubious Glazer’s rationalizations of multiculturalism,
his predictions about its likely course are wholly persuasive.
Despite the multiculturalists’ furious posturing as underdogs,
their grip on the educational agenda is firm. Since their power
depends on the stridency of their demands, however, they dare not
acknowledge their own success—hence the paradoxes of the Sobol
report, simultaneously berating the curriculum for lack of
diversity while struggling to cope with the problems created by the
surfeit of diversity.
What is finally at stake in the attack on the curriculum and
canon is not only the truth of history and the viability of
political union, but the grounds of human understanding
as well. In a forum on multiculturalism in The New York Times, Stanford
anthropologist Renato Rosaldo posed to the reader what he obviously
considered a patently absurd situation: a typical California class
of Asian-Americans, African-Americans, native Americans, and
Chicanos, asked to “learn our heritage … from Plato and
Aristotle to Milton and Shakespeare.” Rosaldo asked: “Must [our
students] continue to look into the curricular mirror and see
nothing?” The question is chilling. To say that Plato, Aristotle,
Shakespeare, and Milton offer “nothing” to an ethnically diverse
class is to say that ideas are nothing, that complex, sensuous
language is nothing, that imaginative exploration of
fundamental human dilemmas is nothing, and that the only things
that are not nothing are race and ethnicity.
The multicultural principle cuts both ways, however. If an
African-American cannot be expected to see anything in Milton, how
can a white student be expected to see anything in Frantz Fanon or
Alice Walker? And how can students see anything in each other?
Despite this inexorable tendency toward cultural apartheid,
multiculturalists loudly proclaim themselves the
first theorists to value the “Other.”
They thereby expose their own ignorance.
The Renaissance humanists, for example,
discovered in the classical world a pre-Christian
Other, whose vision of politics and ethics deeply
challenged the medieval order. Their struggle to understand that
classical Other has provided us with a tradition of engaged
scholarship that makes a mockery of multiculturalism’s shallow
theorizing. The passion with which they approached their study is
embodied in Petrarch’s Letters to the Ancients. In an act of
supreme hermeneutic imagination, Petrarch wrote loving letters to
the classical authors, questioning, sometimes criticizing, them,
struggling to overcome the distance that separated himself from
them.
Multiculturalism’s pigeonholing of authors and historical actors by
race and gender is antithetical to this humanist tradition. It
elevates ignorance and philistinism to a moral principle. No one who
has caught even a glimmer of the complexity of Plato and Milton could
reduce them to coefficients of race and gender. But students have
always sought tools for simplifying the past, for reducing its
vastness to a manageable scale. Deconstruction was particularly
appealing, because negation always seems more powerful than
affirmation.
Multiculturalism continues in deconstruction’s tradition of negation,
but cuts a wider swath. With a single slogan, such as “Hey hey,
ho ho, Western culture’s gotta go!”, students can dismiss an
entire civilization. The effect is intoxicating. Yet it is a high
that will leave us spiritually impoverished.
Our public and private language
is becoming increasingly inarticulate. When our language shrinks, so
does our world. The works of Western civilization offer not just the
foundations of liberalism but voices of unparalleled eloquence and
beauty. They challenge us to respond. By silencing them we are
ultimately silencing ourselves.
Notes
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-
Emphasis added. The emphases in all other quotations from the Sobol
report are in the original.
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