As a nation, America has developed to the point where debunking legendary figures will not cause any real damage, and doing so would help the country prepare for the future.
Knocking myths off of their perches would cause some outrage at first, but there are not serious consequences to it. The motivations of Parson Weems’ storytelling are obsolete: America no longer needs myths to hold itself together; it has gained enough real history over time. The other cost would be depriving children of role models. The fear it, as Bruce Cole put it, “unless we have them, we don’t have anything” (Wineburg 2). The country’s colorful past, however, has provided other, factual characters to take the place of the myths that guided children in the past. Helen Keller, as Loewen argues, is many more times remarkable than people recognize, for her true achievements have been left out of the retelling of her story (10). Not only is she representative of perseverance and determination, but she also campaigned for her beliefs in an era when they were wildly unpopular. Teachers and authors can fill the void of role models without resorting to “heroification” by describing the remarkable aspects of a figure along with their shortcomings, and in the process they can explain the importance of perspective on history.
Moving away from legendary figures has several benefits, such as liberating the country from the constraints of long dead people and creating a more balanced outlook on the world in our youth. Propagating one-sided, continuously positive messages about American history and American heroes only handicaps students into later viewing the world in black and white. In reality, there will never be someone as infallible, wise, and virtuous as the mythical George Washington, and it is not really healthy for kids to think there is. As it is now, there is tremendous resistance to alter anything he or the rest of the Founding Fathers created, despite him being dead for several hundred years. Also, dismantling the canon of legendary figures would allow for more diverse heroes than we have now. As Frisch found in his unofficial study, people of all ages have a depressingly narrow set of famous people from before the Civil War, limited almost entirely to a set of twenty or so politicians and military figures (1138). By seeing fame as more than resulting from just political accomplishments, a wider variety of youth could find inspiration in their heroes.
With that said, history teachers should not be in charge of continuing legends in the classroom. They have the unique opportunity to teach the truth about the past, so it is important that they take advantage of it. By presenting a sterilized view of American history, teachers create students with unrealistic expectations of the country and of the world. They “keep students in intellectual immaturity” (Loewen 25). As a kid, I could remember wondering where the Roosevelts and the Edisons were today, great men with many successes and few mistakes did not seem to exist. All in all, dropping our unrealistic notions of what a person should be might encourage people to take a realistic approach to solving the problems at hand, leading to faster, more workable solutions.