Resurrecting Napoleon

The phrase, “the pen is mightier than the sword”—coined by Edward Bulwer-Lytton in his 1839 play, “Richelieu; Or the Conspiracy”—holds true today; for as history has proven, even the greatest warriors die, while words live forever. Since this nation’s founding, white Americans have wielded the power of representation. Such control has allowed for the construction of a society in which whiteness is perennially affirmed— on television, in art, within curricula, and inside the classroom. Spurned by the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, blacks—and subsequently women and other minority groups— began to demand inclusion in an American Master Narrative from which they were heretofore excluded, yet within which they played an integral role. Out of this era emerged the Black is Beautiful Movement, the development of Black Studies within colleges and universities, and a greater emphasis on Afrocentric education, each of which developed in response to their initial exclusion.

In her book, The Language Police, Diane Ravitch argues that a system of quiet censorship governs American education whereby sensitivity guidelines and expurgation choke intellectual freedom (163). Her central question asks: how did the regulation of offensive language evolve into a system whereby textbooks were purged of all material that “might annoy or offend the most agitated imaginations” (18)? She charts the trajectory of bias regulation beginning in 1997 with former President Bill Clinton’s education initiatives, through 2003 in an attempt to illustrate that what began as bias and sensitivity review has developed into unwarranted censorship which now threatens personal freedom, educational quality, and intellectual agency. In her chapter entitled, “Forbidden Topics, Forbidden Words,” Ravitch provides numerous examples of passages which a Bias and Sensitivity Committee deemed inappropriate for elementary school children, in an attempt to show that: 1) personal biases inherently govern which words, topics, and phrases members of the committee deem to be “biased” 2) the inanity behind the exclusion of certain topics does not warrant their exclusion and 3) bowdlerization reduces the quality of language and literature which results in banal material that fails to foster high levels of intellectual engagement among children. She argues that such purging paints a portrait of the past that is historically inaccurate, subscribing to Napoleon Bonaparte’s belief that “history is a set of lies agreed upon.”

Ravitch avoids explicitly condemning Eurocentrism within history textbooks and instead argues that radical academics, extremists, activists, social reformists, and curriculum experts have asserted that “traditional accounts of American history were not only racist and sexist but Eurocentric as well” (135). She unsuccessfully tries to advance the notion of reverse exclusion as it pertains to European history, claiming that “in the American history depicted in today’s texts, the only civilization that seems to be not so very advanced is Europe’s” (154). She also maintains that extreme multiculturalists who advocated for revised curriculums “ignored the dangers of turning history into a tool for group therapy” (136). Her claims, particularly the latter, fail to acknowledge that prior to the 1960s and long afterward, the model of Americanism advanced in schools served as a form of group therapy for white students by instilling into them a false sense of achievement and credit for modernity. Claims for inclusion, however radical, stemmed from the initial exclusion of non-whites from America’s narrative. While inclusion (multiculturalism) and historical accuracy are not mutually exclusive, Ravitch erroneously constructs a dichotomy between the two, writing that “texts try so hard to be positive that they are misleading and inaccurate” (147). She treats nondemocratic societies with an intolerable measure of condescension, claiming that history texts treat other civilizations with adulation while failing to admit “that many nations today are undemocratic societies ruled by dictators and despots, where ordinary people have few rights and freedoms” (148). In light of Howard Fuller’s article “The Continuing Struggle for School Choice,” and Goodwin Liu’s article on school choice—in which they demonstrate the extent to which one’s freedom and choices are circumscribed by race, poverty, and systemic inequality— one has reason to question Ravitch’s naïve view of democracy. Her own biases become explicit when she fails to recognize the peculiarity of the institution of American slavery. She writes that:

Most texts blame Europeans for African slavery, as if this horror were unprecedented before the arrival of the Portuguese on the west coast of Africa…One of the better texts observes that “slavery existed in Africa and other parts of the world for centuries…” (153).

Additionally, she challenges the legitimacy of textbooks which include the cultural achievements of the Anasazi, yet fail to mention the debate over “whether the Anasazi practiced human sacrifice and cannibalism” (154). And yet, she extols Henry Graff’s, America: The Glorious Republic, as “well written and comprehensive," though Graff undoubtedly avoids mentioning that the pilgrims habitually powdered and ate their dead relatives for sustenance before Native Americans—who they would later annihilate—showed them how to plant and harvest crops.