Conservative columnist Suzanne Fields’ column today is another reminder of how ideological rigidity causes paranoia and anti-intellectualism. She is writing about the ignorance of history among American young people, a well worn topic that should concern us all. Not surprisingly, Fields’ spin on this problem is that liberal “educationists” have been trying to create generations of anti-American kids by making terrorists look good and Americans look bad.
When ideologically rigid commentators like Fields write in this way I always wonder if they understand what they are doing and simply want to satisfy a niche market, or whether they are really so incapable of reasonable objectivity. Commentators like Fields, on the right and left, strike me as folks badly in need of a good therapist. Such an inability to look objectively at the world must originate in a similar inability to look at oneself honestly and objectively.
Fields’ analysis of American textbooks is clear evidence that not only are Americans historically and geographically challenged, but also analytically challenged. Fields’ “analysis” is pitifully short on reasonable assumptions or evidence. She merely asserts that textbooks make radical Islam seem tame, ignoring what she sees as the purpose of textbooks. Quoting a report of the American Textbook Council, Fields sees history and social studies textbooks as “instruments of civic education that have among their responsibilities the obligation to alert the young to threats to American ideals and security.” If the last part of this is not a reasonable definition of propaganda, I don’t know what is. Fields appears genuinely perplexed that textbook authors would try to avoid her biases, which in her mind are “facts.” How sad is that? In what I think is a hilarious (if tragic) example of the problem she sees, Fields uses President Bush’s appeasement language from his now infamous Knesset speech as a positive example of understanding history. Clearly ideological love is blind. Who but a faith based ideologue would hold up George W. Bush as a man capable of “alerting the young to threats” of any kind.
Fields is basically complaining that American textbooks are too objective. She apparently believes that flag waving jingoistic Americanism belongs in the classroom. Just look how effective such an approach to education was for President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the rest of the neo-con mob that plunged America into the worst and most ill conceived war in modern American history.
Fields complains bitterly that any language critical of America is included in textbooks. Had she been smart enough to seek therapy, she would realize that honest self criticism is the most urgent kind of criticism for an individual or a nation. Because children live in a nation where Ms. Fields’ views are omnipresent, it is essential that young Americans be given a more realistic view of their country. In the case of foreign cultures, ideologies, and religions, objectivity requires educators to put them in as neutral a light as possible. Students will undoubtedly get their fill of Fields’ xenophobic perspective outside the classroom. The results of what Fields sees as education are all to present in America today. Ignorance, self deception, and intolerance don’t need advertizing in textbooks. Ms. Fields and her fellow right and left wing commentators inject enough of these “values” into the lives of Americans through the media.
Her final line is most revealing of Ms Fields’ anti-intellectualism. She wants parents, school boards, and administrators to “pressure textbook publishers to tell it like it is.” She sees the world in black and white and wants textbooks to teach kids to do the same.