Back in the mid-1990s, Lynne Cheney was waging a crusade against a teaching resource called the National History Standards, which she called “politically correct to a fare-thee-well.” In 2006, the Florida legislature passed a law requiring that “American history shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed, shall be viewed as knowable, teachable, and testable, and shall be defined as the creation of a new nation based largely on the universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.” In Texas, there’s a labyrinthine bureaucracy that votes on that should be printed in the history textbooks that the state’s schools adopt, including which historical figures should be treated as significant and as positive role models. (Some years back, Thomas Jefferson had a narrow escape from being dropped from those rolls.) Now, there’s the flap over critical race theory, being raised mostly by politicians who barely know what it is but are convinced that it’s something bad.
Underlying it all are two fallacies that needs to be addressed so that, ideally, they can be rooted out, though I’d be naive if I really thought they realistically could be. The first fallacy is that the purpose of teaching history is to shape how students feel personally about their country, about particular historical figures, and ultimately about themselves. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that there aren’t teachers—probably lots of them, in fact—who try to influence how students feel personally about history. Nor am I saying—I certainly am not saying—that it’s only conservatives who try to use history for that purpose. No, it’s everybody, all across the spectrum, who does it, and there’s no way to stop it from happening. But the trouble with laws that attempt to control how history is taught and that actually prescribe interpretations (if the Florida statute isn’t a prescribed interpretation, I don’t know what is) is that such laws formally buy into, and thus enshrine, the notion that affecting how students feel personally about their history actually is, and should be, the mission of the history educator.
The second fallacy is that there’s something desirable about coming up with strict regulations about what teachers can and can’t do in the classroom, where curriculum is concerned. It’s not only in history teaching that you find this; for years, there have been debates about how mathematics and the language arts should be taught in the primary grades, with education theorists constantly coming out with newfangled approaches. The problem isn’t that they come out with these newfangled approaches; the problem begins when someone suggests that the latest newfangled approach is the way and the truth and the light, and that from now on all teachers of a given subject must use this approach, and only this approach, often involving strict constraints on what kind of prompt a teacher can give a pupil who is trying to read a sentence or solve a mathematical word problem. Regulations on what kind of history can be taught represent the same fallacy: they cast the teacher, not as an expert imparting expertise to students, but rather, something more akin to a robot.
I would like to suggest that the ideal history teacher has the following qualities: (1) a fair amount of expertise in the subject matter, and hence the ability to use some independent and flexible judgment in deciding what themes to emphasize and what materials to assign; (2) the propensity to teach students not only facts about history, but also methods of researching it, so as to find out what the primary sources say about a given topic of interest, as well as what scholars who have read those primary sources say about what they mean, and how those scholars disagree with each other on certain points; (3) a broad enough intellect not to think that the facts of history will always support a given ideological bent, and thus the ability to teach history in a way that doesn’t try to prove a single set of theories about what it all means; and, coming back to my earlier point: (4) an understanding of the principle that it is not the history teacher’s job to try to tell students how they should feel personally about the history that they are learning.
Now, let’s be clear: obviously, not all history teachers will possess these qualities. But do we want laws that prohibit history teachers from possessing these qualities? That is exactly what state laws do if they prescribe or restrict specific aspects of historical interpretation in the public school classrooms, because they prevent teachers who have expertise from using it, and they codify the fallacy that the purpose of teaching history is to shape students’ personal feelings about it.
Suppose, for example, that a student says to a history teacher, “My uncle told me last night that the idea for the U.S. Constitution came from the Iroquois Confederacy; is that true?” As it happens, that idea exists, not as a proven fact, but as a theory, one that has both defenders and detractors among professional historians. Each side of the question is able to point to evidence either for or against that theory. A good history teacher will tell that to the student, and guide the student in researching the arguments and the evidence to form an opinion on who’s right. In the process, there’s nothing wrong with the teacher saying “Here’s what I think, while others disagree with me.” However, let me suggest that the worst thing the teacher can do, when asked that question, is consult a policy manual to see what the state legislators want students to believe as the absolute truth, in order to support those legislators’ ideological aims.
Central to the discourse over the years has been the word “revisionist.” In the history profession, the actual definition of a revisionist is any historian who writes a book or journal article that suggests that earlier historians got some point of interpretation wrong and that the prevailing interpretation needs to be reconsidered. In other words, in the history profession, the definition of revisionist is simply an interpretation that is different from what has been published before and that challenges the accuracy of what has been published before. For such a work to be taken seriously, it must furnish some evidence. Furnishing evidence won’t make it the definitive last word, but it will give the new work and its author a place at the table. However, in the popular lingo, the word has an entirely different meaning: it is applied to mean disregarding the truth and publishing or teaching propagandistic lies instead. An earlier draft of the 2006 Florida law would have actually banned the teaching of “revisionist history” in the state’s public schools, which anybody who knows anything about historical research should find embarrassing.
It needs to be made clear that, contrary to popular myth, historians–even the most revisionist and postmodernist of them–acknowledge that there are some facts in history. It is a fact that the Civil War began in April of 1861 right after Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter. It is a fact that Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation at the start of 1863 and that the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, was ratified in 1865. There are lots of other facts. But there are also aspects of history, running all the way through the narrative, that are open to different interpretations by historians, and a good history teacher will get that across to students if not forbidden to do so by the state. For example, exactly what role did antislavery sentiment in the North play in the road to the Civil War? How central was slavery to the country’s economic and social structures prior to the Civil War? What role did slavery play in the crises leading up to the War for Independence, and in the war itself? Teachers have to be able to explore those questions with students.
And now there’s that new bogeyman, “critical race theory.” Obviously, with a term so nebulously defined, it’s scarcely far-fetched to say that where laws prohibiting the teaching of critical race theory are passed, public school teachers will be made to feel afraid to talk about race or to assign reading materials about racism and the civil rights movement at all. The result won’t be a more unifying curriculum, merely a more stilted, stunted one, not just because the topic of race will be missing, but–just as importantly–the ability of teachers to use their own judgment about what to teach and how to teach it will be missing. When the curriculum is prescribed by legislators, you won’t have education; rather, students will just be cynically fed a bunch of names and dates to spit back out on tests, and if they want really good grade, they’ll write papers singing the praises of the state-approved role models.
At the college level, there’s a principle called academic freedom. Academic freedom doesn’t exactly mean the freedom of individual professors to do as they please; rather, it means that the academic profession polices itself, and outsiders to the profession don’t control what gets taught and who teaches it. Something like that should be instituted at all the grade levels. Legislatures should still issue broad guidelines about what subjects should be taught–for instance, that all juniors in high school will be required to take United States history–but they should keep their noses out of the fine points of curriculum so as to allow teachers to use their expertise. If it’s found that not enough teachers have the expertise to teach from their own knowledge and their own judgment, then states need to do a better job of attracting experts in subject matter into the teaching profession, which in some instances means improving the pay, and in other instances means improving the structure and atmosphere of the school systems.
Laws prescribing specifics of curriculum amount to a deskilling of the teaching profession. What is needed, in all subjects including U.S. history, is the complete reverse: the expectation that individual teachers will be experts in their field, and that the curriculum will be the product of their expertise, not of the ideological hang-ups of non-expert legislators.
