The Classroom is a Community of Trust
Reflections on lawmakers’ latest attempts to constrain the teaching of American history.
Young Americans know a great deal about American history. They absorb ideas and impressions of the past through video games, field trips, dinner-table conversations, church sermons, monuments, and SNL parodies. That history comes to them in fragments and shards, in mismatched pieces.
It is up to history teachers to give shape, meaning, and coherence to those scattered names and faces from a dim and flickering past. And yet history is often taken for granted and patronized, casually diminished or shoved aside to make room for other subjects deemed of greater importance, be they basic literacy skills or STEM.
Over the last week, I had a chance to witness, as a kind of participant-observer, what a dedicated history teacher can achieve. Two high school teachers reached out to me, a college professor and historian they did not know, to sit in on their students’ presentations. Our conversations, masked and zoomed as they were, inspired. The students looked like the new America they embody, comfortably diverse and engaged. And they had hard questions about their topics, ranging from the causes of the Civil War to the consequences of the Cold War, from immigration to the history of technology. I am by no means an expert in all those topics, but I did know how to ask students to clarify their thinking, to question their assumptions, to say what they meant by certain words.
I recognized in those two sessions what I had learned four decades ago when I started teaching history: the history classroom must be a community of trust if it is to do its work. Though I did not know the students with whom I discussed hard topics, I could see that their teachers had created a climate of honesty and collaboration, that I could ask questions that might have seemed rude in other contexts, that might have risked offending with their directness and challenge of assumed beliefs. Instead, these 11th-graders took my questions in the spirit in which they were offered, not to undermine their confidence, challenge their identity, or derail their projects, but to help them understand what they were curious and confused about. None of them seemed threatened or annoyed when I asked them to tell me what they meant more clearly, or how they could know that some generalization was true. Instead, they politely thanked me for leveling with them, though we had barely met and would probably never see each other again. Their teachers had created an environment of confidence and honesty long before I appeared on their screen.
In the midst of these visits, I was also reading news accounts of laws being proposed and passed to prevent the teaching of “conflict” in schools. Lawmakers in several states are invoking a phrase few had heard of until recently — “critical race theory” — to prohibit classroom discussions about systemic racism.
Instead, teachers are being pressured to promote patriotism by presenting only positive stories about the United States. The laws are framed in disingenuous terms of avoiding hurting students’ feelings by suggesting that they benefit from inherited advantages, that they are racist by legacy. The fundamental idea of critical race theory, ironically, is just the opposite. It suggests that racial prejudice is not merely an attitude, prejudice, or blindness embodied in individuals but rather is built into institutions and neighborhoods so that it seems natural.
Even if lawmakers did understand what they were legislating against, the laws are misguided, misinformed, and dangerous. They undercut the reason those laws’ supporters argue that history should be taught in our schools: to make students better citizens. They violate the traditions that undergird American democracy: traditions of speech, equality, and engagement. They corrode true patriotism and replace it with evasion and indoctrination.
Our classrooms must be communities of trust, and we know what creates that trust. It begins, regardless of the subject, regardless of the grade level, with teachers’ empathy, compassion, and understanding for the students entrusted to them. The best teachers care enough about their students to take them seriously, to engage them, to question them.
Trust grows, too, when students see that teachers know what they are talking about, that they have mastered the subjects they convey. The teaching of American history is exciting and challenging because our range of vision continues to broaden, because our collective knowledge deepens. We teach history in new ways because there is more to learn about more subjects, because threadbare assertions prove to be untrue, because exciting prospects open when we include as many people as we can in our stories about the past.
Teachers must possess trust to do their jobs effectively. They must trust their principals to sustain conditions of professional autonomy and respect. They must trust their supervisors to understand and promote their discipline, to create opportunities for ongoing, job-embedded professional learning. They must trust their school boards to protect education from partisan agendas and cynical intrusions.
Students must trust that their voices are being heard, that what they have to say will be respected. Sometimes that respect requires that misconceptions be corrected, that incomplete knowledge be augmented, that other opinions be welcomed. Students must learn to trust that other people love their country no less than they do simply because they support another candidate or party.
Students must also trust they are being told the truth. Their ideas must contend with evidence, not explain it away. They need to acknowledge that expertise matters, that people who study a subject for a living know more than those who do not, that professional standards extend beyond “opinion” and are tested in peer review, debate, and further instruction.
The history of history education shows that political concerns and pedagogical fads come and go. The attributes of a good teacher of history, by contrast, have remained constant across generations: curiosity, humility, and concern for students.
Finally, parents must trust their children. Their children are learning about the American past all the time. Systemic racism is all too evident not only in the neighborhoods where they live, but in the very schools where they learn. Critical race theory is embedded in the lyrics of hip-hop and pop music that students of all backgrounds stream and memorize. Ignoring, denying, or raging at those facts does not make them go away. What it does do is make school irrelevant at best, and fraudulent at worst.
