Is history all about white men?
So, I had a few ideas for a blog post this week, but I ended up coming up with a different idea while reading my textbook. In chapter 3 of Teaching Social Studies in Middle and Secondary Schools by Candy Beal and Cheryl Mason Bolick, there is a section that talks about race and gender, and how they are not represented well in social studies. It talks about how we mostly focus on white people and males in our history. It also talks about how we end up talking more about stereotypes, because we learn so little about different races and genders.
I thought back to my high school career, and this was most definitely true. Yes, we talked about slavery, and Harriet Tubman was briefly mentioned while talking about the underground railroad. However, we never really went into detail talking about historical figures of different races in any of our classes. They were mentioned briefly, and there was usually one question on the test where we had to know their name, but after that we never really thought about them again. Many people of different races played a big role in our nations history. Shouldn’t we be talking more about them? Even at the college level, it seems like we talk more about those of different races, but still focus mostly on white historical figures.
The same is true with females in history. We learn all about the role of men in history, but we tend to ignore women. Yes, we learn about women getting the right to vote, but what about before then. All we seem to learn is that they just stayed at home. What about women during the civil war? What role did they play while their men were out fighting? Did any of them fight? How long were women protesting for the right to vote before they got it? It seems like teachers forget to address these questions.
So, why don’t we address these questions? Many may say something along the lines of “Well, it is not covered in the textbook, so I don’t cover it.” This is a lame excuse. With the internet, we have access to a wealth of information. There is no rule saying that we can only teach what is covered in the textbook.
We need to start going beyond the textbook and start covering this stuff. We live in a diverse world, and we need to prepare our students to live and work in this diverse world. How can we expect them to live and work in a diverse world if all they graduate with is little knowledge of a select few people who were of different genders and races? With so little information, all they can form is a stereotype, such as the ever popular, women are housewives. What if we taught more about different races and the role of women in our classes? Would those stereotypes start to slowly disappear? Would racism start to go away? Think about the impact we could make, by going beyond what was covered in the textbook.
So, is history all about white men? Of course it isn’t! History is about men, women, and people of all races. We need to start using primary sources and additional readings from other books or from the internet in conjunction with our textbook to make sure we teach our students this. We need to make sure that our students leave with knowledge of all different groups in our history, not just the select few that a textbook chooses to cover.
Want to read more? Check out these links:
- Article from the Huffington post, “We teach racism, sexism, and discrimination in schools” by Nicholas Ferroni
- “The feminists version of American History you never hear about in school” by Maureen Shaw
