UpDate - Vol. 16, No. 1, Page 3
September 5, 1996
History standards; Prof. heads seminar about controversial issue

     The term "controversial" is an understatement when describing the
National History Standards, according to Raymond Wolters, Thomas Muncy
Keith Professor of History.
     Developed by the National Center for History in the Schools at
the University of California at Los Angeles with a grant of $2.2
million from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the
Department of Education, the standards raised a furor when they were
published.
     In fact, Wolters said, the U.S. Senate repudiated the standards
by a vote of 99 to one, and the lone dissenting senator later said if
he had fully understood the vote, he would have joined his peers.
     This summer, Wolters led a graduate seminar, supported by the
Delaware Association of Scholars, for 17 high school teachers to
examine and discuss the National History Standards. One of the goals
of the seminar was to help teachers analyze the forces that shape the
curriculum, Wolters said.
     The seminar featured several prominent persons who are
knowledgeable about the standards, including:
        * Richard Bernstein, former chief of Time magazine bureaus in
          Paris and Peking, now reporting for The New York Times on
          cultural and intellectual matters, and the author of
          Dictatorship of Virtue;
        * Dinesh D'Souza, former editor of The Dartmouth Review,
          author of two bestsellers, Illiberal Education and The End
          of Racism, currently the John M. Olin Research Fellow of the
          American Enterprise Institute;
        * M. Stanton Evans, formerly a syndicated columnist for the
          Los Angeles Times and commentator for CBS and the Voice of
          America, currently the director of the National Journalism
          Center in Washington, D.C. and the author of The Theme is
          Freedom;
        * John Fonte, executive director of the Committee to Review
          the National History Standards at the American Enterprise
          Institute in Washington and author of articles in the
          National Review and The Chronicle of Higher Education; and
        * Mary Lefkowitz, Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the humanities
          at Wellesley College, an authority on the history and
          literature of ancient Greece, and author of Not Out of
          Africa.

     While most of those who spoke were critical of the standards,
other persons who supported the standards were invited to speak but
declined, Wolters said.
     The speakers discussed their areas of expertise in relation to
the standards. Bernstein was one of the first reporters to write about
the standards and publicize them.
     D'Souza is known as a critic of "political correctness"
manifesting itself as history. Evans, whose field is the Middle Ages,
criticized the standards for ignoring the importance and influence of
Christianity during that era. Fonte, an associate of Lynne Cheney,
former NEH chairperson, who was scheduled to speak but had to cancel,
explained the viewpoint of NEH. Lefkowitz discussed the Afro-centric
theory of history in relation to ancient Greece.
     Among the speakers, there was general consensus that the
standards were tarnished and were unduly critical of U.S. and Western
history, while viewing non-Western societies through "rose-colored
glasses." For example, while Western society has been criticized as
being a patriarchal society, it should be recognized that other
cultures historically have been even more male-dominated, such as
India and its custom of suttee, Wolters said.
     "Although history is subject to some interpretation, it should
not be propaganda or modified to promote self-esteem among different
groups. Although traditional history courses have been remiss in not
including the contributions of minorities and women, the underlying
goal of history is to strive for balance and accuracy, and that is
where much multicultural writing has failed," Wolters pointed out.
     Wolters, a noted scholar on the history of American race
relations, is the author of the recently published Right Turn: William
Bradford Reynolds, the Reagan Administration and Black Civil Rights, a
biographical study of the Delaware-born lawyer who was chief architect
of Reagan's civil rights policies. In 1985, Wolters received the
American Bar Association's Silver Gavel Award for the year's best book
on a legal topic, The Burden of Brown: 30 Years of School
Desegregation.
     Wolters teaches history courses at every level from introductory
courses to graduate courses, including a course on the American civil
rights movement with Howard Johnson, Black American Studies Program.
     A graduate of Stanford University, Wolters received his master's
and doctoral degrees from the University of California at Berkeley.
                                                   -Sue Swyers Moncure