Bias in the History Textbook
Can historical writing be free of perspective?
In the writing of history, there’s usually effort into looking past the perspectives of the history written. History is the study of the present traces of the past, and is therefore highly likely to be biased due to the potential effects it may have on people, or how it affected those of the past. Even if you wanted to simply create a timeline of facts there can be bias in terms of what facts are included in said timeline, making it reasonable to conclude that historical writing cannot be free from perspective.
After all, whatever a human writes, however much they seek to be neutral, is naturally going to have some bias in it. In this case, perspective is defined as the particular attitude toward something. There is technically one true history of how events transpired in the past, as well as their effects on us today, one that may never be fully known in all its details.
But the retelling of this history is told through the lenses of those who might have lived through it, heard about it, or are even analyzing and providing their own perspectives on the matter. And of course, it is usually the winners that write the history we refer to today. Perhaps the most rampant cases of historical writing not being free from perspective are in the history textbooks used to teach students about the histories of their nations.
Here’s just a few examples that point to history being colored by the nationalistic biases of their authors …
- In 1999, Israel had published a history textbook about the founding of Israel. Instead of using a “David overcoming Goliath” story (a well-used reference in the 37th season of the competitive TV series Survivor), the focus was more on advantages held by the Israelis when fighting their War of Independence.
- In 2015, the Texas State Board of Education decided to focus more on states’ rights as a cause of the Civil War than slavery. This prompted very heavy, very polarizing debate.
- And then, there’s the 2015 controversy in South Korea surrounding the decision to use one history textbook for classes, one that shows sympathy towards North Korea and grapples with the causes of the Korean War.
Education is supposed to be the “Great Equalizer,” yet the telling of the stories of nations through the history we’re taught — which should be a matter of facts and gathered supporting evidence — is affected by the agendas political leaders have in order to advance their goals. This, in turn, causes historical writing used in education to lose its objectivity, with the preferred, or even sanitized, version of that history being told to students.
There is value in having perspective in the histories we write, which allows a more thorough analysis of the history written with the various viewpoints in mind. But there is also the risk of perpetrating a fixed standpoint on how history should be interpreted, and therefore, written about in the future. Ultimately, humans are naturally inclined towards wanting their own perspectives, or that of their culture or nation, to be represented in a better light, which thereby influences the historical writing produced and used to define entire time periods and generations.
Where historical writing seems to be free from perspective, however, is in the use of timelines, which present history as merely a series of events, without the provision of there being a connection between the events, though they are placed under the same umbrella subject.
For example, under Civil Rights history, we might consider the first Freedom Rides, the riding of integrated interstate buses into the segregated Deep South, which began in 1961. And in 1962, Attorney General RFK and the ICC ordered the desegregation of bus terminals.
These two events discussed within the timeline are commonly related to each other in history classrooms, even though there are far more factors to be considered to actually say that the former specifically caused the latter, though we like to think they were the primary cause. And even then, this neglects to consider how world events might’ve contributed to politicians’ moves towards desegregation when black people were considered inferior in just about every way (and still are considered so by some today).
Timelines are, generally speaking, common sources of historical writing that seem free of perspective, but simplify history by omitting events or circumstances, or that don’t really connect events and changes in attitudes and policies. It all depends on how the timeline is labelled and organized.
The realm of education is affected by decisions that alter how we dissect and discuss, and analyze and interpret historical events in different ways. These decisions affect the points-of-view we consider, and the language we use in talking about those subjects, which can influence students’ future politics and values and attitudes towards people of different backgrounds from them.
As students’ learning about the development of society is impacted, and their understanding of the various connections the present has to the past colored by this bias, current and future events are shaped by how people absorb the results of historical decisions and attempt to, (not) repeat the mistakes of the past.
While it’d be nice to think that historical writing can be free from perspective, it probably never will be. The study of history is meant to be analysis of past events, which usually entails detailing the significance of events through their impact, and that comes with dealing with a variety of perspectives. This analysis naturally requires us to contextualize the artifacts of the past, with the understanding that culture and power and how we record and retell our history all intertwines.
And at this point, meaningful historical writing cannot be without perspective, because then we’d be forgetting the humanness of our differing viewpoints. Those viewpoints are the contexts we need for synthesizing and connecting events that would otherwise mean nothing without them. It’d just look like actions without motivations, which doesn’t seem to be a part of our humanity.
We will need to be mindful of this subconscious bias of ours as we continue to write down the braided histories of our nations, and the development of the world as we know it today, and as our successors will know it tomorrow.
