On Patriotic Education
This essay was originally published on my website on 10 October 2020.
After months (or, truly, years) of complaining that removing statues of Confederates, Columbus, and conquistadors, along with other monuments to racism and colonialism in our public landscape, would “erase history,” President Trump and his administration took several steps toward doing just that. Trump threatened to pull funding from schools and colleges using 1619 Project teaching resources and tried to ban trainings on Critical Race Theory at federal agencies (incidentally cutting programs related to sexual harassment). His administration held the Constitution Day “White House Conference on American History,” at which the selected scholars painted a blindly celebratory picture of the United State’s from the founding, and wrung their hands over a supposed (and non-specific) woke-liberal boogeyman that wants to make Americans ashamed of their history. (I won’t be giving a full throated review of that event, as I only managed to get through half of it. For complete coverage, see Dr. L.D. Burnett’s thread.) Finally, the president announced his intention to enact an executive order to promote “patriotic education” (even though the national government can’t control what individual schools and districts teach their students). The President is selling the story that what students learn in Social Studies classrooms across the country is radical, anti-(White)American, and defamatory to the Founders. It’s not.
Teaching enslavement and racism — an example
Instead, schools in the U.S. have not done enough to challenge the notion that history is the stories of Great Men, deconstruct misleading narratives of progress, or confront systemic racism and White supremacy.
In 2018, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance project released the report Teaching Hard History: American Slavery which outlined the many short comings in the current approaches to teaching slavery and its legacies.Studying curriculum goals and state standards; subject matter and textbooks; teacher goals, tactics, and confidence levels with the subject; and student knowledge, Teaching Tolerance found that young Americans are woefully un- or misinformed about slavery and teachers have been left in a pedagogic quagmire by a lack of guidance from education leaders or clear messaging in the curriculum standards. Dr. David Blight states in the report’s introduction:
…I can attest to how hungry and needy so many teachers are for knowledge and guidance in this field. We have to feed that hunger, as we also educate both students and teachers. Teachers need what in educational circles is so often called “content.” That means good history, history that does not try to teach to already well-rehearsed simple narratives about American triumphalism, but helps teachers learn and face the difficult, hard questions of our past — slavery, exploitation, violence, dispossession, discrimination and the work that has been done to overcome or thwart those realities.
President Trump’s idea of “patriotic education” stands in contrast to this content, to this constructive model of teaching that is so dearly needed in our schools and it poses a marked threat to reform efforts. The historians at the White House Conference claimed to be concerned by young people’s ignorance of U.S. history and the country’s low rankings on education metrics, yet left me doubting that they’re at all worried by the fact that only eight percent of high school seniors can correctly name slavery as the central cause of the Civil War. Instead the model they signed onto with the president would obscure the centrality of slavery and racism at every turn in American history. They objected to divisive rhetoric in classrooms and , ignoring the fact that it is not the rhetoric that causes division but racism itself. Failing to hold in tension the ideals of liberty and the reality of White supremacy that have both been present and persistent since before our nation’s founding does a disservice to history. The fabled American identity was created by cherry picking heroes and ignoring abuse, but that does not mean that the abuse was insignificant to the national project or should be left undiscussed today.
Broken Record
Watching these events unfold in recent weeks, I felt a mixture of scream-into-the-void frustration and impending propaganda-induced doom, along with slight deja vu — even though the original incidents came before my time. Then, I heard that former Second Lady Lynne Cheney had a new book out about the Virginia Founding Fathers and the mirror seemed complete. Everything old is new again. Everything from the 90s has come back into fashion — from bucket hats, to fanny packs, to fear mongering about how the libs are trying to get the kids to hate America through Social Studies.
I didn’t know much about the battle over the National Standards on National History Standards or the history of Social Studies education in general until quite recently. I knew that the textbooks were often ancient and reeking of Antebellum apologia, that we spent weeks on end discussing the Constitutional Convention while the Red Power movement got only a side bar (and Black Power was left out entirely or demonized), and that my eighth grade teacher was wrong when he taught us that the Civil War was about states’ rights. So in 2018, I flew to England and spent two Oxford terms struggling through political philosophy and the gloom of the sun setting at 4pm before I learned how my education had come to be.
From what I can gather from the writings of historians and commentators who were actually alive to see it, a bunch of historians and educators got together in 1994 and suggested that schools teach more inclusive histories with an emphasis on critical thinking, primary source analysis, and the use of varying textual media. And Lynne Cheney along with Rush Limbaugh and other political pundits said, “not on our watch.” In fact, before the National Standards on United States History were released, Cheney penned an ominous and enciting op-ed entitled “The End of History” in the Wall Street Journal, in which she fingered “political correctness” as the culprit behind the murder of “traditional history.” Limbaugh, for his part, derided the multicultural lens employed in the standards. Today, their White House-endorsed conspirators similarly view diversity with disdain and complain that young Americans aren’t being inspired by history, which must be positive and celebratory in order to be inspirational, apparently.
Making of a Nation
The 1994 Standards did make their way into curriculums and teaching models across the country; still as I indicated in the section about teaching enslavement, they did not bring about a radical progressive and/or anti-American shift. Instead, throughout my secondary education in the 2010s, my classmates and I were still given exceptionalist history, try as my excellent teachers might have to get us to question it. The controversies 26 years ago, today, and at many points in between (Lynne Cheney wrote “The End of History, Pt. 11” in 2015 about AP US History) display the importance of what we know about our past and how we learned it in our personal and communal identity formation. They also show Americans’ high awareness of that importance and self-consciousness when it comes to historical interpretation; they show how invested we are in the stories that we tell about ourselves and the people who came before us, shaping our world. With their op-eds, the White House conference, and the 1776 Commission, Trump and his history cronies are playing to an ever-shrinking portion of the American public that fears losing power and needs stories of past greatness to reinforce their egos. The United States has always been diverse in race, nation of origin, and thought; its leaders have not always been good; and the revolutionary spirit has persisted to create a more equal and equitable union over generations. These are two very different stories we can tell about ourselves, and one is having less and less appeal:
That old familiar tale of the pioneer man alone with his family, or the Protestant man alone with his God, or the rights-bearing man alone with his conscience only made sense when one was confident that the individual’s virtues were a natural endowment rather than the product of character-molding processes of socialization. Different assumptions critically affect the moral of one’s story.
Joyce Appelby, “Recovering America’s Historic Diversity: Beyond Exceptionalism,” 1992.
If to teach patriotic history is to hold up rich White men as unimpeachable heroes who created a country that was perfect from its inception, then I’m not interested. If to teach patriotic history is to transmit a sense of the potential of that country, of people who’ve tried and failed and tried again to match their lived reality to the ideals of freedom and equality central to the national project, then that’s the kind of education I want. That’s the kind of education I want to be a part of.
