Don't Trust Your History Textbook

It was not until this term that I realized the depth of my distrust in history textbooks. The moment I was again confronted with the evenly-divided columns, the shiny illustrations, the neat headers, I felt like drawing into myself, my capabilities as a thinking individual undermined. What are textbooks but the product of deception from a source of authority intent upon bending public understanding of complex issues?

Before Exeter, I would not have been able to conceptualize a framework of education that did not involve them; the public school system in my home country utilized one standard textbook per subject for every classroom in the whole country. Exams tested students on their ability to rotely memorize boxed summaries of entire chapters, themselves summaries of nuanced events and phenomena. After having been exposed to two years worth of courses—anthropology, genetics, epistemology, among others—that substitute textbooks for texts and books that engage the learners’ critical thinking capabilities, I am horrified at the thought of students going through the school system learning from textbooks alone.

“The hand that holds the pen writes history,” declared the revolutionary novelist Colette, the eponym of Keira Knightley’s latest bio-drama set in Belle Époque France. Indeed, history is a collection of stories: stories created for and embraced by a group to subsume the individual experience and provide the lenses through which all life is viewed, instigating dissent, revolution, change. It can never be objective.

One does not become an “ethical” historian, therefore, by “telling the truth;” one becomes an ethical historian by saying outright that one is a subjective and potentially misleading storyteller with an agenda.

The great danger in textbooks lies in how they masquerade biased interpretations, popular opinions, theories tested or untested, as unadulterated facts. The Vietnamese history textbook, created by the victorious Communist North, negates our civil war as nothing more than the Resistance War Against America. Yes, I am referring to what you learnt in your history textbooks as the Vietnam War, or the second “Indochina” war. This is not dissimilar to the American Civil War, also known as the War of Northern Aggression, also known as the Great Rebellion, also known as the Freedom War. Or World War II, also known as The Great Patriotic War.

Yet unless we all agree to include half a dozen asterisks for every entry, how many of these names make it into history textbooks? Indeed, I count myself as a very fortunate individual for having the perspective of PEA’s U.S. History layered on top of eight years at a Communist public school, layered on top of my family history of allegiance to the Southern Ngô Đình Diệm regime—in my total confusion I do not lose sight of the fact that history absolutely depends on who is the victor.

Or who is granted the largest platform in accordance with contemporary social values, as is the case with Howard Zinn’s revisionist A People’s History of the United States. Zinn had a specific agenda, and he acknowledged it, too. In the very first chapter of this best-selling non-fiction, he wrote, “I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past's fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare [...] That, being as blunt as I can, is my approach to the history of the United States. The reader may as well know that before going on.”

Indeed, the reader may as well know that Zinn can and will manipulate facts, put some voices in the spotlight and dismiss some others, to accomplish the radical purpose of telling “a people’s” story. He challenged the bias of patriotic narratives by substituting it with a bias of his own.

Again, there is nothing inherently wrong in historians siding with whoever they feel the strongest allegiance too: this is their job. The search for objectivity is one of the most futile searches in the history of humankind. A “nuanced” argument is still just that: an argument.

Telling historians to stop being opinionated is like telling them to write without a thesis. Ultimately, we all have a side; the key issue here is to make sure we pick it with our eyes open, after having considered the topic from a multiplicity of lenses rather than being cajoled into one by one source of tainted facts. It is the job of educators, then—not historians—to help students make informed choices by exposing them to the widest variety of texts possible, from regional, national and international voices. The textbook can rest on the shelf.