Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History by James W. Loewen

Author:James W. Loewen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Teachers College Press
Published: 2009-05-26T16:00:00+00:00

The infant emerges easily … and is immediately placed to the mother’s breast as she lies down. The umbilical cord is cut in anything from a few minutes to as much as an hour or more later. At that time or soon after, the father and close friends may be invited to see the child, who by then is happily suckling.27

Students might contrast this with our “scientific” birthing system, which is modeled on having an abdominal tumor removed. Even in a “normal” birth, Western doctors remove the baby uphill, against gravity, sometimes with forceps. Although no one is ill, this operation takes place in a hospital, a place for the very sick, rife with infectious diseases. Often the “patient” is sedated, at least from her waist down. Almost one-fourth of all births in the U.S. are genuinely surgical: Caesarean sections. Increasingly, these operations are done at the behest of the mother or for the convenience of the physician.28 Whether Caesarean or “normal” delivery, the baby must be brought to consciousness, having been sedated along with the mother. Often the father does not snuggle his baby but only gets to look at it through a window.29

To be sure, modern medicine has cut infant and maternal mortality, even though Turnbull states that Mbuti birthing rarely results in death. Nevertheless, we may have things to learn from “less advanced” societies, and not just about childbirth. Our ways of rearing children, for example, may not promote happy, well-adjusted, effective members of our society as well as the Mbutis’. Certainly our children mostly play indoors and have become estranged from nature, which may have bad long-term consequences both for them and nature.30

Even our technology, though assuredly more powerful, may not be better in that it may not meet our needs over the long term—not if, for instance, it leads to global warming, ozone depletion, or other planetary changes that prove catastrophic for our descendants. Chapter 1 pointed to the need for every topic in U.S. history to relate to the present. This very first topic—most distant from the present in time—turns out to be intensely relevant. Not only is prehistory fiercely debated today, but how students think about primitive cultures may have ramifications for our society’s future. Two anthropologists who specialize in studying gathering and hunting peoples, Richard Lee and Irven DeVore, put the question baldly: “It is still an open question whether man will be able to survive the exceedingly complex and unstable ecological conditions he has created.”31 We cannot go on forever increasing our use of Earth. Yet we still do not act urgently about environmental concerns. Possibly we must move quickly to a steady-state use of energy worldwide. Certainly we must change those behaviors that otherwise portend no long-run future.

Surely our educational system should help students address Lee and DeVore’s “open question.” Indeed, this is the most important question students could possibly consider. To take it seriously—to ponder thoughtfully the likelihood of global warming, other forms of pollution, and the accidental or

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