History, Written By the Mob
When we can’t decide what’s true, that’s no time to decide what’s taught.
Working in a public school, you learn a lot about the subjects kids like and dislike. I’ve been working in public schools since 2014, and the breadth of things I’ve heard about every subject would only be surprising to someone who hasn’t spent even a small amount of time with American teenagers. Thankfully, I get the smart ones. Where I coach, speech and debate boast the two highest average GPAs per student in the school. On our teams, we have the next two valedictorians, salutatorians, and a smattering of others in their respective top-10’s. When these kids talk about their education, they’re taking it seriously. These are the students who could get into schools like Harvard and Columbia, but will ultimately choose to save the money and stay home at schools like the University of Minnesota.
Like any student, they have preferences. A number of my students are proficient in music and mathematics, and they work very hard. They’re into theater and the artistic expression of the English language. Some, though not many, like history. That was always my favorite. But for many students, who weigh classes based on long-term usefulness, history seems to stand out as particularly useless to students of all levels of academic achievement. After all, when you’re being taught about the American Civil War for the eighth time in ten years, why wouldn’t you begin to feel that the information is both repetitive and boring?
Many Americans feel history is an important thing to learn. They will quote the often-attributed-to-Winston-Churchill line, which actually belongs to Spanish philosopher George Santayana, “those who do not learn from history are destined to repeat it.” They’ll throw out idioms and cliches describing the importance of history in what we teach our children, to learn from the mistakes of our predecessors. Using it to form the future by learning from the past.
But this is incorrect. History is not a merely static series of facts and debates about what caused or was affected by moments and decisions throughout our past. It is not a sheet of things to be memorized and regurgitated, simply to serve some comforting idiom about not repeating our history. None of these things are why we teach history.
History, like math, science, and language, is a tool. It is the context for all art, the reason for language, the experience of humans and the intersection of all other subjects. It is the living, changing representation of our past in the modern lexicon and how we contextualize life in this nation and across the world. And it’s for this reason that American conservatives are so protective over history, so defensive of their interpretation and their context of history that insulates their comfortable lives from the reality that their comfort was built upon the oppression of hundreds of millions of people. It’s history that builds the idea of a “western society” that was somehow exceptional to other societies in other parts of the world. It’s their history that excuses the oppression of Christianity as fervor, and builds the church to be a benevolent force for good, despite the long record of political action by the church to cement themselves in control of whole groups of nations as those nations enact the tragedies that befell non-Christian nations like the Crusades and slavery.
Even today, as conservatives continue to work themselves into a lather over non-issues like teaching critical race theory in high schools across America and confusing that with teaching history, we can see how this idea of history as a tool impacts the national discourse. Where liberals see history as a tool to contextualize and internalize the past, conservatives see it as a weapon to impose their views and values on millions of children across the nation. Where liberals see history as a pillar of a balanced education to build critically thinking and morally independent citizens of a nation, conservatives see history as something to be owned and controlled to build the history and story of this nation into what they want it to be rather than what it is in reality. This sort of historic colonialism isn’t new. Conservatives are raised on this history as though it is Biblical because it is critical to their worldview that they see history as though it is sacrosanct. Parents and teachers spent years talking about American exceptionalism, the free enterprise of America, and Reaganomics as direct descendants of the benevolent Founders, and to say anything that questions that belief is blasphemous. Instead of building a bond of church and state, they demonized the state and made politics their church, and their church is rooted in the history of the United States as they believe it to be.
Perhaps no example encapsulates this more than the debate over the legacy of the Founders like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who owned and traded slaves. Founders like Alexander Hamilton who, despite his Broadway fame as an abolitionist, very much took part in the slave trade as a well-to-do New Yorker in the late 18th Century. We sit and discuss in academia about the legacy of these men, stained as they are, and if these stains should have any bearing on how we look at them. But that’s the problem with history as a tool. Debate is good and, among those who have a recognized standard of truth in history, is necessary to truly find the contextualization for the times in which we find ourselves relative to that history. It’s important for the interpretation of critical, legal documents like the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights. But when everyone is taught history in school, and that history changes depending on how one falls politically, the tool becomes something we fight over rather than earnestly debate.
History becomes something to be won, rather than something to be learned and taught.
“History is written by the victors” is one of my favorite history-related phrases. Its origins are unknown, and it is wildly debatable. Some would argue it’s not even close to true, just look at how we talk about the Romans versus the Mongol Empire and you’ll find that it’s whoever gets paid to write the history, not necessarily the victors. But this phrase is one that sticks in the mind of every conservative when talking about education, specifically about history. I remember growing up and going to conservative functions where whole conversations would be devoted to the “power” in being a teacher and shaping young minds. The adults around me disparaged teachers as power-hungry academics who get into the profession simply to brainwash young children into their liberal ideology. This wasn’t based in anything, it was simply a belief these men and women held, and why we were homeschooled for a good chunk of my education.
Content in history is absolutely the most contentious part of the debate. CRT is a hot-button issue now, though if you’ve spent any time in a school you know that this isn’t being taught at all, but what do facts matter when debates ended a long time ago? The reality is that we call these things “debate” to make everyone feel like they’re equal in the conversation, but part of history is learning that not everything is equal and that there is truth and there is fiction. History is a tool. It is the bedrock of truth in our society, the things that are undeniable. When people start to deny history and tell us that our facts are incorrect, not because they have evidence to prove it but because they are made uncomfortable by it, then we are in a situation where debate needs to end. We are no longer having constructive conversations about our history. Education’s number one lesson is that facts help us critically examine the world around us and we use our experience and knowledge to determine our own belief system and morality, but the facts are not debatable without evidence. The core of truth is in facts, in the indisputable realities that we know to be firm until new evidence is presented. When that foundation crumbles, when the idea of truth is controversial simply because truth is uncomfortable for many, then there is no way forward but to re-establish truth by any means necessary.
But here is the really insidious part of this conversation: shaking and breaking that idea is often intentionally used to usurp societal truths by those who seek power by controlling history and how it is both told and written. There are those, mainly conservatives, who continue to see and use history as a weapon to be wielded by the strong. If they can shift enough trust out of history as a teaching tool, they can control what history says and prevent educators from teaching what we know to be true. This creates the situation we’re in right now. Societal pressures from parents and conservative education activists leaning on locally-elected school board members to get their way and allow the parents, not the educated experts, to decide what is acceptable to teach in schools and how it should be taught.
At some point this will need to lead to a conversation about what right the parents have to step into a school and tell teachers how to do their jobs, but that is a conversation for another day.
The only way we stop this is for school boards to begin to stand up for themselves. For too many in those positions, this was a locally prestigious position that allowed them to feel appreciated and noticed by their friends and neighbors for being “the one on the School Board.” It was about their own gratification and ego, a stepping stool to the state assembly. These are the people being faced with enormous pressures and threats from fringe groups over how they lean in regard to truth. Not just history, but teaching truth in even the less-than-totality that we can all agree is already insufficient. School board elections will become more important than ever, being involved with your child’s education to uphold a rigorous standard of truth will be more important than ever, and if these should fail, then we need those who value truth in education to take the time and effort and run for school board.
Our future, the future of American public education, and the future of all American students is dependent on finding a strong response to the insidious forces that now work against even the idea of truth in American society. We need to respond with as much force as we can possibly muster.