New History Curriculum Stirs Passionate Dissent : Education: State prepares to choose unified texts, but ethnic groups battle for their own versions.

As the state Board of Education prepares to consider new history textbooks for California public schools this week, a fundamental question underlies much of the discussion:

Is it still possible to write a single history for all Americans--one that weaves together all of the ethnic, racial and religious experiences that have helped forge the United States? Or have California and the nation gone so far down the path of ethnic separatism that common links no longer can be taught?

The question arises because the new books, as they have moved through the state’s textbook adoption process, have encountered passionate protests by blacks, Latinos, Asian-Americans, American Indians and fundamentalist Christians, among others.

Each of these groups wants to tell its version of U.S. and world history. Some would like to add “facts” disputed by some historians, while others insist that embarrassing material be ignored or minimized.

Despite the protests, the state board is likely to approve the textbooks because they are essential elements in an effort--being watched around the country--to breathe more life into the teaching of history in California classrooms.

The new curriculum is being tested in a few school districts and, if adopted, will not be in widespread use for another year or two. It calls for much more instruction in U.S. and world history at earlier ages, puts a renewed emphasis on geography and includes instruction at every grade level in the history of religion, a subject often avoided because it is controversial. There is also much discussion about democracy--how difficult it has been to achieve and maintain.

“The California curriculum is an improvement in every way,” said Gilbert T. Sewall, director of the American Textbook Council, which seeks to improve the quality of social studies textbooks.

If the board approves the books at its meeting Friday, the battleground will shift to local school boards which must decide whether to buy the books. Protests are expected in large urban districts with heavy minority enrollments.

Many critics concede that the books--Houghton Mifflin social studies for kindergarten through eighth grade, and an eighth-grade book published by Holt, Rinehart & Winston--contain far more information about racial and religious minorities than earlier textbooks.

“The issue is not whether people are included in the books or not,” said Joyce E. King, a black woman who cast a “no” vote when the Houghton Mifflin and Holt, Rinehart & Winston textbooks were approved, 10 to 3, by the state Curriculum Commission in July.

“There is a fundamental attitude that predominates in these books and that is not understood,” said King, an associate professor and director of teacher education at Santa Clara University.

That “fundamental attitude” is largely white and European, according to King and other black critics, who say the historical achievements of whites are over-emphasized, while those of nonwhites are ignored or given superficial treatment.

King, who was born and educated in California, said she did not learn about the Harlem Renaissance, the 1920s blossoming of black art, music and literature, until her junior year of college when she was a Stanford University student studying in Italy.

Some black educators want to supplement, or even replace, what they call “Eurocentric” history with an “Afrocentric” curriculum that stresses the accomplishments of blacks, especially of African-Americans. They contend that such a course of study would improve both the academic performance and the self-esteem of black youngsters.

While many educators agree that textbooks have ignored or minimized the contributions of blacks and other minority groups, some call this new ethnic approach “happy history” or “feel-good history,” which they say would be as much a disservice to black students as the discriminatory texts of the past were to whites.

They also believe that teaching several different ethnic histories, instead of a unified U.S. history, could contribute to an unraveling of American society.

“Pluralism is a positive value,” Diane Ravitch, professor of history and education at Teachers College, Columbia University, recently wrote in the American Scholar, “but it is also important that we preserve a sense of an American community--a society and a culture to which we all belong.”

“If there is no overall community with an agreed-upon vision of liberty and justice, if all we have is a collection of racial and ethnic cultures lacking any common bonds, then we have no means to mobilize public opinion on behalf of people who are not members of our particular group,” Ravitch wrote.

Said state Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig, “The question is, do we keep the society together or do we break up into tribal warfare?”

But some who stress the ethnic approach to history dispute the idea of “common bonds.”

“These common values that people talk about are really the white man’s values,” said Herbert Kohl, a white author and educator. “There is this Greek, Eurocentric notion that there are values that come from the West against which the whole world should be judged. That simply isn’t so. There are other values that aren’t European that have equal merit.”

Charlotte Crabtree, professor of education at UCLA and chair of the Curriculum Commission subcommittee that supervised the textbook adoption process, said a new approach to history was badly needed because “kids are abysmally ignorant about history, a fact that has been confirmed by every major national assessment in recent years.”

California “wiped the slate clean,” wrote new curriculum guidelines, then asked publishers to come up with textbooks to match the new guidelines. Most publishers declined, but Houghton Mifflin produced a “marvelous series--it is not perfect but it is a great improvement over what is in the schools now,” she said.

“Now we are seeing a power play on every side,” Crabtree added. “If everything is going to turn out to be a bloody battle over the curriculum and over every word in the textbooks, then it will destroy the system.”

Several concerns have been raised in letters and at public hearings of the Curriculum Commission and the State Board of Education. Among them:

* Representatives of several Jewish organizations said Judaism is subjected to a more critical analysis than Christianity in the Houghton Mifflin series. They also objected to references in the sixth-grade book to the participation of Jews in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

* Muslim speakers said treatment of the roots of Islam in the seventh-grade book is inadequate and some suggested that only a Muslim author could write an accurate account.

* Henry Der, executive director of Chinese for Affirmative Action, said the frequently brutal treatment of Chinese railroad workers in the American West is given scant attention. “We do not want ‘ethnic history,’ ” Der said. “We want accurate history for all children of all races. We do not want to be marginalized.”

* Sam Rios, director of Chicano Studies at California State University, Sacramento, said the Houghton Mifflin series “does an injustice” to Mexican-American history, although Latinos have been less specific than blacks in outlining alternatives.

* Representatives of several gay and lesbian groups complained that their organizations are excluded from the history texts.

But the strongest criticisms have come from blacks.

Some African-American educators and scholars contend that ancient Egypt, the source of much that is valued in Western civilization, was a black African nation, not the multicolored, multiracial society that has been portrayed in most histories.

Gary B. Nash, professor of history at UCLA and one of the authors of the Houghton Mifflin series, said this argument “is simply not accepted by most African historians, black or white.”

The debate is not surprising to Nash, who described history as “a form of property” that has been “generally used by elites” to control what is known about their societies.

“What we’ve seen since the 1960s,” Nash said, “is a massive redistribution of the property of history. It is no longer exclusively the property of white males. We are hearing from many groups--blacks, Asians, Latinos, women, even gays and lesbians, who all want to erase this historical amnesia.”

“The challenge for people like me is to weave all these stories together in an accurate and balanced way,” he said. “In order to do that, you have to decide how much attention to pay to what, or you would wind up with a book you had to carry around in a wheelbarrow.”