War on History Education

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

Our exchanges with them are actually transactional emails about the filing of paperwork to request a pilot course code and our response to their request that the College Board explain why we believe the course is not in violation of Florida laws

What does the word ‘intersectionality’ mean?” and “Does the course promote Black Panther thinking?” FDOE did not bring any African American Studies scholars or teachers to their call with us, despite the presence in their state of so many renowned experts in this discipline.

Florida expresses gratitude for the removal of 19 topics, none of which they ever asked us to remove, and most of which remain in the official framework.

FDOE’s most recent letter continues to deride the field of African American Studies by describing key topics as “historically fictional.” We have asked them what they meant by that accusation, and they have failed to answer. The College Board condemns this uninformed caricature of African American Studies and the harm it does to scholars and students.

The assertions about the role slavery played in the American Revolution shocked many of our readers. But these assertions came directly from academic historians who had been making this argument for decades. Plainly, the historical ideas and arguments in the 1619 Project were not new.

What seemed to provoke so much ire was that we had breached the wall between academic history and popular understanding, and we had done so in <em>The New York Times</em>, the paper of record, in a major multimedia project led by a Black woman.

Those outside the academy tend to think of history as settled, as a simple recounting of what events happened on what date and who was involved in those incidents. But while history <em>is </em>what happened, it is also, just as important, how we <em>think </em>about what happened and what we unearth and choose to remember about what happened. Historians gather at conferences, present research, and argue, debate, and quibble over interpretations of fact and emphasis all the time. Scholars regularly publish articles that analyze, question, or disagree with the respected and peer reviewed work of their colleagues.

Mary Ellen Hicks, a historian and Black studies scholar

“The discussions about the 1619 project … have made me realize that historians may have missed an opportunity to demystify the production of scholarly knowledge for the public. The unsexy answer is that we produce constantly evolving interpretations, not facts.”

It is the bitterest of ironies that the 1619 Project dispenses this malediction from the chair of ultimate cultural privilege in America, because in no human society has an enslaved people suddenly found itself vaulted into positions of such privilege, and with the consent—even the approbation—of those who were once the enslavers.”

What these bills make clear is that the fights over the 1619 Project, like most fights over history, at their essence are about power.

“After all, as several eminent academics have recently reminded us, ‘nations need to control national memory, because nations keep their shape by shaping their citizens’ understanding of the past.’”

When courses, especially those that were created and supported by some of the United States’ most esteemed scholars and organizations, appear to have been rejected without a transparent process, all educators and community members should be concerned and have the right to request more information on the process used.

NCSS remains committed to monitoring the political landscape of teaching social studies. We reserve the right to issue additional statements in the future regarding the AP African American Studies course if we believe it is necessary to do so.

As<span class="css-8l6xbc evw5hdy0"> </span>students flee the humanities — interest in <a class="css-yywogo" href="https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_325.50.asp" title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">English</a> and world languages is declining nationally — how much money should universities continue to put into them? Is it time to make tough choices about what students really need in order to be educated?

We simply have lost the support of the American public,” said E. Gordon Gee, the president of West Virginia University.

Penn State, for instance, faces a <a class="css-yywogo" href="https://www.psu.edu/news/administration/story/board-approves-tuition-operating-budgets-through-2024-25/" title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">$63 million</a> deficit this year, despite a hiring freeze and other savings. Rutgers University in New Jersey has been slashing budgets and raising tuition to help close a $77 million deficit.

Over the last decade, the university has invested in projects like new buildings for agriculture, engineering, student health, student housing and recreation, conferences and labs, and it has renovated its athletic facilities

Nationally, public colleges and universities have doubled their reliance on tuition since 1980, but in West Virginia, the figure has nearly tripled, according to the analysis. More than half — 56 percent — of total revenue for the state’s public colleges and universities now comes from tuition; in 1980, the figure was 19 percent. If West Virginia lawmakers had maintained education funding at the level of a decade ago, most of the current deficit would be erased, the report said.

Out of 1799 historians who received a PhD in the US between 2019 and 2020, 175 have full-time faculty positions. <span id="easy-footnote-1-405738" class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust"></span><span class="easy-footnote"><a href="#easy-footnote-bottom-1-405738" data-hasqtip="0" oldtitle="Steven Mintz, <a href=&quot;https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/higher-ed-gamma/what-should-we-do-about-undergrads-who-want-pursue-humanities-doctorate&quot;>&amp;#8220;What Should We Do About Undergrads Who Want to Pursue a Humanities Doctorate?&amp;#8221;</a> <em>Inside Higher Ed, </em>December 15, 2022. Accessed January 5, 2023." title="" aria-describedby="qtip-0">¹</a></span>

And it’s about teaching, which is what every normal person in the world thinks is our main job, and which the field as a whole does not prioritize, train for, reward, or even really understand.

Erin Bartram is the School Programs Coordinator at The Mark Twain House &amp; Museum in Hartford, CT. She earned a PhD in 2015 from the University of Connecticut, where she studied 19th century United States history with a focus on women, religion, and ideas.

The history classroom can, and should be, a place to learn context but also a safe place where people can discuss the  issues at hand. This can be a far-cry from the debates raging on Facebook, X or other platforms.

Scholars argue that popular historians write simple narratives to reach the widest audience while academic historians are critiqued for writing narrow and dense prose. However, the internet, especially web 2.0 and social media, has blurred these lines.

Among academic historians, the conventional approach to scholarship is driven by historiography and archives. What does this mean? When an historian sits down to decide upon a new research topic, the historian asks questions. Historiography is the inside-baseball term for the body of literature around a given topic and the writing on the hows and whys of practicing history – how one should evaluate evidence, form an argument, and understand the philosophy of historical inquiry.

A survey of where Americans get historical information found that 62 percent get it from TV news with 55 percent using newspapers and magazines for historical knowledge. Nonfiction history books came in much lower on the list at 32 percent but above social media at 26 percent. College courses came in below video games and DNA tests, with 8 percent of the public citing courses as a source of historical knowledge.