by Theodore Douglas

Created on: September 06, 2009

"Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press..." Amendment I, United States Constitution (1791)

In 1798, the US Government tried to circumvent the right to free speech in passing the Alien and Sedition Acts. One of these acts gave the government right to imprison a person for uttering anything "false, scandalous, and malicious" against an administration official. The law was designed to quell political dissent, and it nearly fractured the tenuous base of the new nation in the process.

In the intervening two centuries, there have been a variety of sedition acts and other laws enacted that abridged the right to free speech in times of war or other extraordinary circumstances. None has gone unchallenged. So why would one voluntarily weaken the constitutional right of a textbook author to speak with his or her own voice about America's past?

While there may be valid reasons to feel that students do not get a clear vision of America's history from their textbooks or teachers, the idea of ceding control over the production of textbooks to government overlooks a number of important facts.

First, textbooks are edited. In short, the most scandalous interpretations of American history are not going to be in a mass-market textbook. Students will be insulated from these fringe theories, at least until they are accepted by the wider academic community, without the hint of government intervention.

Second, since they are designed for a wide readership, textbooks necessarily gloss over plenty of historical dilemmas (like discussing the morality of slavery in its proper historical context). Teachers, not textbooks are going to strive and fill in the blanks. Standardized tests, whether dictated by the state or federal government, already keep classes on a relative straight and narrow, else students would be ill-prepared for these examinations.

Aside from standardized tests, there is another layer of government intervention many tend to overlook. Often times, school administrators choose from a variety of American history textbooks and select the one they feel is best. In other words, at least one level of government already censors what reaches the hands of students, since a textbook no one reads is hardly capable of polluting the minds of America's youth.

If one truly feels government (and I presume this means the federal government) should have the final say on school textbooks, an entire generation will get one "definitive" interpretation of the American past, one that can always be edited at the government's leisure. Is it really desirable to have America's future leaders provided such a shallow base of knowledge of American history?

Whether you're examining the era of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams or George Bush and Barack Obama, history has proven an important tool in understanding the events of the present and looking towards the future. If we allow the government to interpret America's history, we the people are left shackled to an official past. What happens when that interpretation becomes politicized? What kind of power would government end up with? What happens if a person dares question the official past?

In his opus 1984, George Orwell offered an image of a world where the government controlled history. It was not a pleasant one. Of course, it's all Newspeak to us...

Learn more about this author, Theodore Douglas.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.