A few weeks ago, I received a copy of a new civics textbook being promoted around the country. It's called Civics for Democracy: A Journey for Teachers and Students (Washington, D.C.: Essential Books, 1993), and unlike the usual civics text, which talks about how various institutions of government work, this one aims to show students how they can bring about change in government. As an introduction, the book devotes several chapters to important citizen protest movements like the civil rights and the labor movements. A textbook like this must do two things. It's not enough to acquaint students with techniques for protest and social action; it needs to teach them to think about public issues. But instead of helping students learn how to think, this book tells them what to think. It seldom acknowledges that there are different points of view from the one it presents, and sometimes it is downright wrong.
Those of us who participated in the March on Washington, which took place 30 years ago last month, will be shocked to see how the book minimizes and misrepresents that great event. We are used now to huge numbers of people coming to Washington in support of a cause. In 1963, no one had ever seen a group as large as the 250,000 who gathered to present the demands of the civil rights movement and show it was a coherent force.
The goals of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom--that was its full name--were enormous. They called for an end to all segregation (in housing, schools and voting), an increase in the minimum wage and the creation of jobs. And, with the March, a movement that had been primarily black and southern became a national crusade in which white
northerners and labor and religious leaders joined in solidarity with black Americans.
You would never know any of this from reading Civics for Democracy's treatment of the March. It ignores the March's grand purpose, claiming that the goal was to support a single piece of legislation. It devotes more space to Malcolm X's criticism of the March as a "sellout," "a takeover" by "the white power structure" than to the March itself.
The presentation of the March on Washington is consistent with Civics for Democracy's treatment of the entire modem civil rights movement--it's no surprise that the book prefers Malcolm X and Huey Newton to Martin Luther King. There have always been thinkers who see every conflict in terms of irreconcilable differences and who believe that conflicts--like the one between black and white Americans--can be resolved only if one side vanquishes the other. But this is just one point of view--and it isn't particularly democratic. Unfortunately, Civics for Democracy is not responsible enough to present any other point of view--or honest enough to identify its own bias.
The book's picture of the labor movement is similarly distorted by bias. One of its central points is that the labor movement lost its potential for success and greatness--and became less democratic--when it expelled its Communist members. According to Civics for Democracy, the expulsion took place because of "pressure from government and society," but few reputable historians would agree. Indeed, most recognize that unions expelled the Communists for the same reason that they fought Nazism, Fascism and Communism--they represent systems that destroy the democratic right of workers to have free trade unions.
Civics for Democracy criticizes the labor movement for joining the "mainstream of the Democratic party" after World War II and treats this, along with the expulsion of Communist members, as another big reason for its decline. What should unions have done? If you combine the author's view that the Communists were the best people in the unions with her idea that joining the Democratic (and, presumably, the Republican) party was selling out, it's hard to escape the conclusion that the labor movement should have supported the Communist party--a bizarre conclusion at this point in history.
The recommended student activities, which suggest that the appropriate attitude towards most institutions is suspicion, reflect this bias. For example, students are encouraged to look for toys that do not meet Consumer Product Safety Commission standards, carry out surveys of buildings that are not accessible to the handicapped and analyze public school sports budgets for discrimination against female sports. It's important for kids to be aware of their responsibility in such
matters and the power they can wield. But a full year of only this kind of thing is likely to make them feel that our country's institutions and leaders are fundamentally rotten. That's not what a civics text should be doing--unless, of course, you're trying to overthrow the system rather than teach students about it.