War on History Education

The annual meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA) is rarely an occasion that sparks intense controversy, but this year’s gathering of historians proved to be an exception. At the business meeting on January 6, 2025, AHA members overwhelmingly passed (428 to 88) a resolution condemning Israel’s “scholasticide” — i.e., intentional decimation of educational and archival infrastructure — in Gaza. Given the lopsided nature of the vote, it then came as a shock to many AHA members and observers that the 16-member AHA Council subsequently decided to veto the resolution, declaring that it was beyond the scope of the association’s mission

What is stated as a matter of fact is only what can be considered beyond dispute: that the IDF’s campaign in Gaza has obliterated all 12 universities in the territory and led to the deaths of hundreds of teachers and professors, not to mention thousands of young students.

At a moment like this, eschewing political controversy could prove to be the most divisive position of all.

The applicant will not operate any programs promoting “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) that violate any applicable Federal anti-discrimination laws, in accordance with Executive Order No. 14173. The applicant understands that federal funds shall not be used to promote gender ideology, pursuant to Executive Order No. 14168, Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.

Requiring public colleges and universities to investigate complaints about what students say and do in the classroom and on campus.

Authorizing state boards of regents and state officials to overrule professional judgment, to reject the “consensus or foundational beliefs of an academic discipline,” and to censure or terminate faculty (regardless of tenure) if they deem them to have violated vague standards of “intellectual diversity.”

while I personally support the BDS resolution, what has soured me on the MLA is not the failure to adopt it, a failure which might have also resulted from sending it to the delegate assembly,

Historians, and all who teach and care about the American past at historic sites, in museums, libraries, publishing, and in social studies and history classrooms should loudly protest this incursion into our schools, our writing, and our minds.

We urge our colleagues and all citizens committed to democracy to speak out against those who truly seek indoctrination, to advocate for good history.

Our society has never needed us quite as much as now.

the point of the mythic past is that it’s mythic. The desire is for a past that never existed, and to have nostalgia for a past that never existed, you must go further and further back, until the details are murky enough that you can project any fantasy you’d like onto the period.

As each generation ages into its disposable income, movie studios mine the childhoods of their audiences for nuggets of IP gold, resurrecting franchises that should have stayed dead and selling toys to adults. For every person who complains about cynical cash ins, there are three more willing to spend their money on reboots and merch. Nostalgia sells.

But if we want to defeat fascism, we must fight our natural impulse toward nostalgia.

Federal executive orders that seek to undermine educational equity and inclusion go against the values that make New Jersey great.

This is a gross overreach of federal power and antithetical to the values that New Jersey aspires to uphold. The federal government has always had a limited role in K-12 education.

In recent years, however, parents have witnessed schools indoctrinate their children in radical, anti-American ideologies while deliberately blocking parental oversight.

“Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” (January 20, 2025) shall apply to this order.

“Patriotic education” means a presentation of the history of America grounded in:  (i)    an accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling characterization of America’s founding and foundational principles;  (ii)   a clear examination of how the United States has admirably grown closer to its noble principles throughout its history;  (iii)  the concept that commitment to America’s aspirations is beneficial and justified; and (iv)   the concept that celebration of America’s greatness and history is proper.

Ending Indoctrination Strategy to the President,

1776 Commission in the Department of Education

upon request, advise executive departments and agencies regarding their efforts to ensure patriotic education is appropriately provided to the public at national parks, battlefields, monuments, museums, installations, landmarks, cemeteries, and other places important to the American founding and American history, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law;

[e]ach educational institution that receives Federal funds for a fiscal year shall hold an educational program on the United States Constitution on September 17 of such year for the students served by the educational institution,”

demanding acquiescence to “White Privilege” or “unconscious bias,” actually promotes racial discrimination and undermines national unity.

d)  “Patriotic education” means a presentation of the history of America grounded in:  (i)    an accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling characterization of America’s founding and foundational principles;  (ii)   a clear examination of how the United States has admirably grown closer to its noble principles throughout its history;  (iii)  the concept that commitment to America’s aspirations is beneficial and justified; and (iv)   the concept that celebration of America’s greatness and history is proper.

too many children do not thrive in their assigned, government-run K-12 school.

Within 90 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of Defense shall review any available mechanisms under which military-connected families may use funds from the Department of Defense to attend schools of their choice, including private, faith-based, or public charter schools, and submit a plan to the President describing such mechanisms and the steps that would be necessary to implement them beginning in the 2025-26 school year.

When our public education system fails such a large segment of society, it hinders our national competitiveness and devastates families and communities.

In a time when assaults on higher education are the most acute since the McCarthyite assaults of the 1950s, the University’s leadership and trustees have abandoned any duty to protect the university’s most precious resources: its faculty, students, and academic mission.

As Columbia’s Board of Trustees has become constituted largely by hedge fund managers, investment bankers, and venture capitalists, the university has become more of a real estate holding concern than a non-profit educational institution.  With this degradation of the university’s leadership has come, in some cases, an inability to resist pressures placed on the university by outside entities carrying a brief for the destruction of higher education, and in other cases, a shared commitment to a right-wing, and pro-Israel, ideology.

At that moment, I had a long-overdue realization: How we as Americans approach restrictions on literature curriculums is not only flawed but also wholly reactionary. My experience at that meeting and others convinced me that the problem is not <em class="css-2fg4z9 e1gzwzxm0">that</em> we disagree, but <em class="css-2fg4z9 e1gzwzxm0">how.</em> We need to shift focus away from reflexive outrage about restrictions and bans, and toward actual discussions of the merits and drawbacks of the individual books.

one element unites all the conflicts around these bans — a political and ideological partisanship that buys more into contemporary culture wars than into our students’ education.

The truth is that all schools have curriculums, and that deciding what is included and what is not is a crucial responsibility that involves subjective decisions about what is best for students. And I do want to give this notion some deference.

We can and ought to reject the false binary being sold to us today, because there <em class="css-2fg4z9 e1gzwzxm0">is</em> some value in restricting curriculum to children when those decisions are informed by a knowledge of the books and the capacities of the students.

Over the past few years Republican lawmakers in well over thirty states across the country have passed legislation that impacts how educators teach the history of race and white supremacy in the United States. Regardless of their intent, the legislation has created a climate of fear among educators and conviction that any attempt to address incidents like the one that took place this past weekend will result in disciplinary measures, including termination.

“I’ve never used the word oppression in my classroom,” said Renel Augustin, who teaches African American history at a high school in Davie, Fla., covering everything from the trans-Atlantic slave trade to the civil rights movement and beyond.

She has mentally practiced what she might say this year: “We’re not here to talk about that. We are here to learn. Let’s move on.”

We cannot accurately understand the world today without knowing how it got that way—which is to say, through history, the discipline that explains how everything in the world came to be the way that it is. In the real world, everything—politics, economics, religion, etc.—is connected to everything else. This is the context in which leaders decide and act. And the skills of evidence-based analysis, conclusion, and communication learned in history classrooms remain central to how today’s officers approach the challenges and gray areas of the real world. As an all-encompassing and an integrating discipline, history is a capstone discipline for leaders.

History also teaches us to be skeptical of first reports, reductive explanations, and single-perspective narratives.

They need to know the deeper histories of the cultures and religions that still animate important regions of the world today (i.e., Greek/Roman, Judeo-Christian, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian). They need to know about the emergence of modern democracy and the continuing appeal of authoritarian forms of government, nation states and great power rivalry, an industrialized global economy, and the origins, persistence, and fallacies of modern racism.

There is no body of professional knowledge that can be mastered without reading and a deeper comprehension of what we have read.

In every history core course, midshipmen are required to produce critical analyses of sources, argumentative essays based on evidence, or longer research papers

Some in the larger public seem to believe—or insinuate for their own purposes—that teaching history is a form of political indoctrination. Our faculty have a diversity of personal views, but these are checked at the classroom door. We do not “cherry-pick” history for “facts” to support contemporary viewpoints—that is bad history, and we do not teach bad history. Moreover, midshipmen are not that gullible. They demand the complete picture. In our classrooms we work hard together to ensure that this happens.

Complexity challenges and often frustrates us. History teaches us to respect that reality, to accept that we cannot simplify complexity, or, if we want to be effective leaders, walk away from it, but that we must persevere with complexity as an inescapable part of past and present reality.

The more we learn, the more we realize how little we know

As Adrianna Kezar, Tom DePaola and Daniel T. Scott note <a class="css-yywogo" href="https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/10/10/you%E2%80%99ve-heard-gig-economy-what-about-gig-academy" title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">in their book “The Gig Academy,”</a> about 70 percent of all college professors work off the tenure track. The majority of these professors make less than $3,500 per course, according to <a class="css-yywogo" href="https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/04/20/new-report-says-many-adjuncts-make-less-3500-course-and-25000-year" title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">a 2020 report</a> by the American Federation of Teachers.

From 1976 to 2018, “full-time administrators and other professionals employed by those institutions increased by 164 percent and 452 percent,” according <a class="css-yywogo" href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00346764.2021.1940255?tab=permissions&amp;scroll=top" title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">to a 2021 paper on the topic</a>. Professors have been sacrificed on the altar of vice deans.

It’s the end of history. And the consequences will be significant.

Without professional historians, history education will be left more and more in the hands of social media influencers, partisan hacks and others unconcerned with achieving a complex, empirically informed understanding of the past.

About one-quarter of teachers reported that limitations placed on how teachers can address topics related to race or gender have influenced their choice of curriculum materials or instructional practices.

teachers most commonly pointed to parents and families as sources of the limitations they experienced.

Teachers perceived that limitations placed on how they can address race- or gender-related topics negatively affected their working conditions, and they worried about limitations' consequences for student learning