News of the Profession

Education Reform and the History Wars in Florida

The following is taken directly from the legislation:

Lines 1155-1163: The history of the United States, including the period of discovery, early colonies, the War for Independence, the Civil War, the expansion of the United States to its present boundaries, the world wars, and the civil rights movement to the present. American history shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed, shall be viewed as knowable, teachable, and testable, and shall be defined as the creation of a new nation based largely on the universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.

Lines 1211-1219: The character-development curriculum shall stress the qualities of patriotism, responsibility, citizenship, kindness, respect for authority, life, liberty, and personal property, honesty, charity, self-control, racial, ethnic, and religious tolerance, and cooperation. In order to encourage patriotism, [stress] the sacrifices that veterans have made in serving our country and protecting democratic values worldwide. Such instruction must occur on or before Veterans’ Day and Memorial Day.

Lines 1149-1150: [Stress] the nature and importance of free enterprise to the United States economy.

What made this case both interesting and ironic for me is that this year I started to assign Peter Charles Hoffer’s Past Imperfect (2004) in my history methods and graduate classes. Hoffer vividly chronicles this movement to control the interpretation of history on the part of conservative activists and how academia has responded to it. For my students, the situation in Florida gave them a local petri dish to examine how the issues Hoffer confronts are still alive. It was a chilling epilogue to the book.

The history of this legislation began in 2005, when Florida senator Mike Fasano introduced the following language into Senate Bill 2180 (and later in the 2006 version): “The history of the United States shall be taught as genuine history and shall not follow the revisionist or postmodernist viewpoints of relative truth . . . . American history shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed.” It should be noted that the New Port Richey senator is also a member of the Knights of Columbus, an organization that had a very vocal and visible fight in the early 1990s over how Christopher Columbus and his expeditions should be commemorated during the Quincentenary Jubilee. In committee, that language gave way to the less confrontational yet more problematic, “factual, not as constructed, shall be viewed as knowable, teachable, and testable.”

What made the revised language so problematic is that by losing the relativism and postmodern phrasing and instead adopting “factual, not constructed,” it leaves the reader with the impression that history is “just facts” and of course is unchanging and not interpretive in nature. This, of course, is what the lawmakers envision as history; however, the Florida Department of Education, the National Center for Education Statistics, and the National Assessment of Education Progress all demand that history be taught as analytical and interpretive, and that it measure critical thinking. So now the “A-Plus-Plus Plan” directly contradicts the standards and expectations of the federal and state departments of education. These agencies on the federal level assess how effectively states are complying with No Child Left Behind and could open the door for the U.S. Department of Education to rebuke the state over these reductive measures.

Even if these policies were ignored by state and federal education agencies, if implemented as intended, they will wreak havoc in history classrooms across the state. First, teachers are expected to teach just facts, specifically facts that promote patriotism, the free markets, and the genius of the Declaration of Independence. Tucked into the law are proclamations to teach the contributions of African Americans, women, and Native Americans. What are the plans to address how and why these groups were systematically left out of the freedoms guaranteed by the founding documents? Will mere facts satiate the questions of bright young students? As such, this law leaves history teachers ill-equipped to guide the intellectual development of their students. 

­—Robert Cassanello
University of Central Florida

Report on Delegates Meeting of the ACLS

A distinguished group of university presidents, congressmen, professors, and representatives of learned societies, met in Philadelphia, this May,  to discuss the future of the humanities. Convening with the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) were the American Association of Universities and the National Humanities Alliance. This was a timely meeting as Congress considers National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) funding for next year. Representatives James Leach (R-IA) and David Price (D-NC) relayed their own conviction of the importance of the humanities and the dangers of deficits in humanistic knowledge and understanding and discussed the role of the seventy-one member bipartisan Congressional Humanities Caucus, which, with the help of active constituent support, works to increase funding for the NEH. As submitted, the federal budget calls for level-funding, but because of unfunded mandates increasing costs for staff, the budget actually holds less funding for programs. Moreover, the funding is far from its historic heights. The caucus is asking for a relatively modest but meaningful increase of $15 million.

The ACLS continues to work to increase funding in the humanities and to support new directions in research by its successful appeals to foundations and the skillful management of its portfolio—the envy of many in the audience. The ACLS will increase to sixty-five the number of fellowships as well as the stipend level awarded in the coming year. At the same time, as part of an effort to have dues cover something closer to half of the running costs of the organization than they do currently, the ACLS proposed an increase in constituent dues, which the delegates voted to approve.

Other topics discussed including the role of technology in the humanities. Paul Courant, professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan; and James O’Donnell, professor of history and provost at Georgetown University, led the discussion, raising questions of increasing accessibility of archival resources through digitization, who will own the archive, the national specificity of “fair use” doctrine, and the appropriate role of university presses and university libraries in arguing for fair use and in collaborating with private enterprise regarding digitization.

Finally, David Skorton, president of the University of Iowa and soon to be president of Cornell University; David Marshall, professor of English and comparative literature and dean of humanities and fine arts at the University of California, Santa Barbara; and Nicola Cartwright, professor of fine arts at Amherst College, discussed institutional issues facing the humanities, from the role of university presidents in visibly and audibly funneling resources to the humanities, to making decisions about how to support what Marshall called the “shadow university” created by the proliferation of interdisciplinary programs, and the need to combat the label “elitist” and disseminate information generated by learned societies including through paid publicists. 

—Sarah Deutsch
Duke University and OAH Delegate to ACLS