History seems to me an excellent contrast to science in this context: established source materials, newly discovered source materials, matters of interpretation and evidential weight, faith and self-interest based distortions...
Take, for example, the European conquest of the Americas.
We now take for granted that a high school history class will explicate the conquest in terms of superior arms technology and ever-increasing numbers of conquerors--the underachieving savage, overwhelmed by musket and fecundity--though even this is a recent correction to a more jingoistic notion of Manifest Destiny.
But scholars now know that a overwhelming percentage of Native Americans were killed not by bullets but by pathogens, which raced far ahead of any armed might. An especially liberal school system might inform its students of the disgraceful handing-out of smallpox contaminated blankets to Native Americans by U.S. troops, but it is extremely unlikely that they will note this was hardly necessary: the pathogens found their own way very nicely, thank you.
A national mythos based on being a plaque vector doesn't have quite the same panache as "we just kicked their butts and took it"--Manifest Contagion, anyone? Without germs, the European influx might well have been repulsed despite superior arms. With greed and guile, the settlers defeated a disease-decimated New World; this is certainly not the stuff of parade ground exaltation.
A related example is the mythos of super-abundant American wildlife: the bounty of nature untapped by the thinly scattered natives.
It is now fairly clear that the herds of buffalo as vast as inland seas, and the skies darkened by passenger pigeons, were the direct result of pathogen-devastated Native American populations. Like the deer now denuding Eastern forests because the wolf was exterminated, these wildlife populations surged without the Native Americans' predation. This truer story makes the extinction of the passenger pigeon (and what a beauty it was!) and the near-extinction of the buffalo even more disturbing.
Ah, yes, Tonto lived lightly on the land, so scattered that he left hardly a trace: an attrative notion, but, in fact, Tonto was a sophisticated land use manager, burning off underbrush and harvesting wildlife resources aggressively to support large populations. The European conquerors first disrupted the ecological balance, and then took the resultant population explosions as a Limitless Bounty License for harvests that extinguished entire species.
Similarly, controversies about the Pledge of Allegiance, when examined at all by secondary history or civics classes, might at best consider the current religious-vs.-secular cultural conflict of "one nation under God"--but are very unlikely to note that the "under God" was a mid 20th century, Cold War addition to an older, secular pledge; yet the insistence on the current pledge most commonly relies on appeals to long tradition and the Founding Fathers.
These critical history studies--like earlier critical legal studies which made the (to me) apparent point that codified systems of law serve property and power--are rigorous and persuasive. But one is unlikely to encounter them in elementary or secondary school rooms.
Conspiracy? Not exactly, but certainly a reluctance to give up comfortable illusions and self-deceptions.
Anyone paying attention in a science classroom knows about the tentativeness of conclusions, and the importance of replicating results and attempting falsification: the encouragement to question is built into the subject.
Adulterated history, on the other hand, is America's second religion. Science courses may oversimplify or methodize, but the intellectual sign-posts of correction are built-in: what other subjects of study can make that claim?
Social, political, and cultural myths and illusions permeate all the "liberal (ha!) arts": what we are witnessing now is an attempt to reach into the science classroom with the same vapid hands, because science is dangerous to the maintenance of illusion. Ultimately, the movement to bring religion into the classroom is not so much about religion itself, but rather the alarming consequences of clarity.
This message has been edited by Omnivorous, 12-03-2005 12:13 AM
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