(10 of 11)
In the 2-1/2 years since Cheney wrote this summing-up, there have been--according to the NEH's present chairman, Sheldon Hackney--no significant changes in the NEH's policies, criteria or grant system, and most of its senior staff remains in place. What has changed, though, are Cheney's ambitions for fame and influence. She is building her credibility for a post in a future Republican Administration. And if revisionism, hypocrisy and opportunism help, so be it.
Thus the foofaraw and froth blowing over the NEH-sponsored American History Standards, of whose content, Cheney claims, she was quite unaware when she was running the agency. These history standards are a special focus of conservative ire and are greatly misrepresented by Cheney and her allies. Co-sponsored by the NEH in 1992, they were written by a team of teachers and professors whom Cheney impaneled under the directorship of UCLA historian Gary Nash. Their aim was to provide a curriculum guide to American and world history for teachers of U.S. elementary and secondary students in grades K through 12. They are not a textbook. They lay out themes, areas of historical inquiry, ways for students to engage a subject. Their use is voluntary: they are a blueprint, not a rigid template, and they are not mandated by the Federal Government.
Properly used, they will lift school history teaching far above the names-and-dates mediocrity that has always plagued it. Their approach is bracing and invites continuous argument and engagement. One of their virtues is that they include the study of cultures and states outside Europe and North America, including Africa, China, South America and Japan; and that they ask students to think seriously about civil rights, union history and other issues of race, gender and class in America--issues without which America's past and present cannot possibly be understood.
The standards certainly have their flaws of emphasis: no mention of Aztec human sacrifice to balance the brutalities of Cortas, for instance; a downplaying of Japanese barbarities in World War II; a perceptible bias in the treatment of the cold war; and maybe 20 other lapses out of some 2,600 topics. Too much pluribus, not enough unum, in historian Kenneth Jackson's words. Still, nothing that couldn't be fixed with further discussion and editorial goodwill, as a number of historians and educators, including principled conservatives like Diane Ravitch, have pointed out.
But Cheney and her supporters took the blemishes as a pretext to denounce the standards as hopelessly p.c., anti-Western, anti-American, anti-white, pessimistic and skewed, and called not only for their cancelation but for the abolition of the NEH as well.
"The standards deserve full and critical discussion as a partial prescription for our educational ills," wrote Douglas Greenberg, president of the Chicago Historical Society, last January. "They do not deserve to be caricatured for narrowly partisan reasons." But they were, unrecognizably, and the caricaturists seemed not to care that the eventual losers would be American schoolchildren.