Chapter 19: Covering the Conflict and Missing the Point

The attack on the National Standards for History (UCLA, 1994) on the oped page of the Wall Street Journal (Cheney, October 20, 1994) by Lynne V. Cheney, the wife of vice president Dick Cheney and the former chairwoman of the National Endowment of the Humanities, initiated a controversy, framed as a patriotic defense of the integrity of American school curricula, that actually had little to do with education and much to do with politics. It was also a controversy that could not have been started or sustained without the often unquestioning help of media outlets. As many social studies educators know, Cheney’s 1,500-word essay blasted the standards for making only fleeting mention of George Washington while naming discredited Sen. Joseph McCarthy 19 times and the Klux Klan 17 times. She alleged that the document gave short shrift to the U.S. Constitution and the first gathering of the U.S. Congress. Famous white, male inventors and generals were excluded. She asserted that for the sake of political correctness the standards gave “unqualified admiration” to African and other non-Western societies while rendering the American story as a regrettable narrative shaped by self-dealing scoundrels. Halting the endorsement of the standards by the federal government, she wrote, would require going “up against an academic establishment that revels in the kind of politicized history that characterizes much of the National Standards.” But, Ms. Cheney argued, “the battle is worth taking on. We are a better people than the National Standards indicate, and our children deserve to know it” (Cheney, 1994).