Teaching History

This letter is in reference to Ruth Rosen’s Column Left, “The War to Control the Past” (Nov. 24). In it she defends the new standards for teaching U.S. history and criticizes the political right for their negative attitude toward them.

I have taught U.S. history on both the senior and middle school level for over 20 years, my politics have always been and still are significantly left of center and I think the new standards are wrong.

History is not about making people feel good. History is a search for truth. The truth of U.S. history is that it is a story dominated by white males of European background.

These males have used their power position for great good and much evil, but the power has been theirs. To tell the story any other way is to sacrifice truth in the name of making the various minorities feel better. This is not only bad history, it doesn’t work. We don’t gain self-respect by lying about our past or our present.

JIM TURNER

Granada Hills

Rosen exposes the latest raw nerve in the struggle for cultural control in this country.

Despite the call of Rush Limbaugh and his dittoheads simply to teach “what happened,” there is a great deal more to any study of history. Those of us in the classrooms understand implicitly that there is no monolithic interpretation of the past, while truth is often open to subjective investigation and healthy questioning.

Lost in the current debate is the longstanding abdication of conservatives from the trenches of public education. They have traditionally confined themselves to dogmatic pronouncements from the bully pulpit of the media or imposed their views “from the top down” by getting elected to local school boards.

Until the political right deigns to join the ranks of hard-working teachers, their influence in the educational arena will only be marginal and unsatisfying.

QUENTIN PANEK

Sylmar