Why I start every school year with Howard Zinn

Jorge Luis Borges once wrote a short story about cartographers who produced a perfectly accurate map of an empire to scale; the map was, by necessity, the same size as the empire itself.

The people then abandoned the real world and went on to inhabit the map. Of course, the story is completely absurd. A map can only be useful if it is infinitely smaller than the area depicted. The study of history is subject to the same concern. Any record of the entire course of human events (even of a short time period) would be so voluminous that it would be completely unreadable.

{mosads}In fact, the vast majority of things that occur on a daily basis must be excluded. Imagine a history of the civil war that included the details of every single battle, the life story of every single participant, etc. As a result, historians are forced to leave things out in the process of creating an understandable narrative. Historians have to make tough choices about what they will report and what they will leave out; what they emphasize and deemphasize.

All historians make such choices. The values they use to inform those choices amounts to bias and all history is biased. This fundamental, eye-opening truth is one of the most powerful statements ever uttered about how we ‘do’ history. This idea is not new and it is not mine. This argument comes from the late Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States.

Zinn, in his less well known Declarations of Independence, stated, “there is no such thing as impartial history.” Every choice a historian makes serves a purpose, whether intentional or subconsciously. Every description of the past “serves some present interest.” When a history text chooses to focus on the economic success of “Captains of Industry” more than the struggles of the labor movement (or vice versa), it serves a particular narrative about the American story.

As the great George Orwell once wrote, “those who control the present, control and the past and those who control the past, control the future”. When a text or teacher ignores or deemphasizes the struggles of the labor movement it serves the interests of those who are anti-union today. Without this history, most Americans are unaware of the role unions played in creating reasonable wages, workers rights, ending child labor, and a variety of other benefits all Americans have today, even if they are not in unions. With that knowledge, it is much harder to justify the recent attack on union organizing like the ‘right to work’ laws being pushed in many states.

Any choice shows bias; neutrality cannot exist. The issue is even more pronounced in middle school and high school history textbooks, where huge topics are generally broken down to a short, single-digit length chapter. That is why Zinn’s philosophy of history is so important. His work explicitly brings this issue to light; he starts off his work by clearly stating his biases for the reader to see.

Students must be made aware that these biases exist, that they are unavoidable, and we are exposed to them at all times. That is neither a good nor a bad thing; it is simply a thing that everyone must be cognizant of when they study history. Like him or not, Zinn’s work is an essential part of the historical cannon to which all students should be exposed. That is why this September, like every September, I start the year with a reading from Howard Zinn.

Ron Widelec is a high school history teacher in NYC and a progressive activist on Long Island, NY.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.