State Superintendent Jillian Balow’s Statement on Proposed U.S. Department of Education Rule Prioritizing Critical Race Theory Curriculum in K-12 SchoolsCHEYENNE – The U.S. Department of Education has proposed priorities for American History and Civics Education grant programs published in the Federal Register. Those priorities include encouraging districts to use curriculum related to divisive author Ibram X. Kendi and the New York Times “1619 Project.” This is an alarming move toward federal overreach into district curriculum and should be rebuked across party lines.
The draft rule is an attempt to normalize teaching controversial and politically trendy theories about America’s history. History and civics should not be secondary to political whim. Instead, history and civics instruction should engage students in objective, non-partisan analyses of historical and current events. For good reason, public schools do not promote particular political ideologies or religions over others. This federal rule attempts to break from that practice and use taxpayer dollars to do just that.
America needs to update and renew our expectations for teaching and learning about history and civics. Every school board, state legislature, and state superintendent should be working to build local consensus about what should be taught and what materials to use in classrooms. Every family should be engaged in activities that ensure the rising generation is properly prepared to be informed citizens. Every student deserves a rich and engaging education about America’s triumphs, treacheries, losses, and victories. Our touchstone is our shared principle that all Americans have infinite value and individual freedom and responsibility. We must strive to find common goals and values as a nation, not tear each other and our country apart.
The proposed federal rule is open for public comment until May 19 and can be accessed here, or by using the Google search for “Federal Register American history and civics education.” I intend to comment, and I urge you to research the issue and comment if compelled.
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So stated a recent announcement by the Wyoming Secretary of Education, Jillian Balow.
Here's another view of the same topic, to a degree, by another educator:
Teaching History
It's well worth reading.
Let me be the first to admit, I don't know what's going on.
When the 1776 Report came out, I started a thread on this topic. But then, just a couple of days later, Joe Biden was inaugurated and the report was pulled and the 1776 Commission axed. It's back up now in a Presidential archive section. I was going to post my thread anyhow after the inauguration, but time went on and then it seemed irrelevant, particularly in the wake of the January 6 insurrection. Now, however, Administrator Balow warns;
Those priorities include encouraging districts to use curriculum related to divisive author Ibram X. Kendi and the New York Times “1619 Project.” This is an alarming move toward federal overreach into district curriculum and should be rebuked across party lines.
The draft rule is an attempt to normalize teaching controversial and politically trendy theories about America’s history.
Is this right? I.e., is this a redrafting of history for a political agenda. Darned if I know. It does bring to a head, however, how history is taught, and the nature of history itself.
This isn't a new topic by any means.
Let's get a little background and start with the 1619 Project, even though that isn't really the starting place for this overall discussion at all. And let us first note, I haven't read it. Indeed, when it first came up, via The New York Times for me, I didn't read it as I don't subscribe and couldn't get past the paywall. From what I understand, however, the 1619 Project seeks to refocus attention on the introduction of race based slavery in the US and it may, or may not, take the position that this defines the US or at least the US economically ever since then. That was in turn taken as an attack upon American history by some, and the 1776 Report was the Trump Administration sponsored counter.
The report generated a lot of controversy, a little praise, and a lot of condemnation. The obvious purpose was to promote a patriotic view of American history and, for that matter, one that promoted the concept of American Exceptualism. I read it (it wasn't long) and it appears to have been an anticipated introductory effort that would be further developed over time by the 1776 Commission that authored it. As they were sent packing, they won't be, at least for the time being. The report clearly took the American with a mission approach in its work, but based upon my reading of the Report, it's one document wasn't exactly a magnum opus. Maybe that's because it was introductory in nature.
You'll frequently hear the argument that history was once approached the way that the 1776 Commission would have it in US schools, and should be again, but if that's true, it must have been quite awhile back, before I was in school, and that would therefore be a long ways back. Prior to the 1970s anyhow. I haven't had the occasion to read any public school history texts dating back that far, so I don't know the extent to which they took that approach. Indeed, the only history item I know about grade school education, in history, in Wyoming from prior to the 1960s dates from the 1940s/50s and comes from The Cocktail Hour At Jackson Hole, which relates the author's amusement at grade school students being required to memorize certain dates in Medieval history. While that amused the author, that impresses me, as there was certainly nothing like that going on when I went through school.
In contrast, I was really impressed with my daughter's high school history classes which were remarkably in depth. I know a lot of history, but at one point she came to me and asked about certain specific policies from Weimar Germany that I certainly didn't know off hand. That high school students were learning that, and being tested on it, was impressive.
Anyhow, there's been a debate going on about the teaching of history now for at least a full decade, or more like two. The general concept behind the debate is that at some point academics who are political liberals took control of the field, or maybe every academic field, and students quit learning to be patriotic. I probably didn't put that right, but that's because there's a number of ways to even consider this topic in terms of people's beliefs. Some would argue that history has become diffused with a liberal agenda that teaches students to hate their country. I've heard that argument specifically. People who adhere to that view, want history accordingly corrected to reflect, they'd argue, the truth, as they see it, which is, coincidentally, largely praiseworthy of America's history. Others would in fact flat out argue that people should be taught a history supporting patriotism, but they wouldn't at the same time regard this as boosting propaganda.
On the other side of this coin there are those who really do feel that American history needs to undergo massive historical revision, in the revisionist sense. This actually feeds directly into the argument on the other side, as there actually are far left historians who take a very dim view of the US and its history. It wouldn't go too far to say that some of these historians are Marxist, although that needs to be mentioned in a cautionary manner as there are Marxist historians in the west who write very conventional histories. It's that they approach history from a certain social and economic view. The recent excellent biography of Hirohito, for example, was written by a Marxist historian and it certainly isn't Communist propaganda in any sense. On the other hand you have authors like the late Howard Zinn whose approach was more in the nature of propaganda than history.
Added to this, we have theories, like Critical Race Theory, which is discussed in the link above. Critical Race Theory comes out of Critical Theory, which is in fact a Marxist way of analyzing society and power structures. It's one of the disciplines of the far left which ironically became rooted in academia, with academia becoming massively expanded in the US post 1945.
From the prospective of a historian, even an amateur one, this debate is both fascinating and scary. It's scary because history actually does involve the conveyance of facts and truth. History does require interpretation, but that interpretation is mostly in-depth analysis and explanation, not bending it to your will. When that occurs its no longer history, it's propaganda. And history itself has taught that the bending of history to a will can pervert it, and that perversion can be extremely dangerous. Indeed, the "stabbed in the back" myth the German populace bought off after 1918 gave rise to the disaster of 1939-1945, in perhaps the most dramatic example of what can occur when facts are tormented, twisted and eliminated to support the world outlook of a cause.
So let's look at this a bit deeper and where we seem to be at today.
Let's start first with piercing a common cliché. It's not true that "history is written by the victors".
In free societies, history is generally ultimately written pretty straight, for the most part, but there are eras of revisionism, and propaganda. And that's the thing to keep in mind. So the age old claim by some that history is always slanted, isn't really true in the sense in which it is made.
It can be, however.
It can also be slanted, i.e., weighted towards something, and we'll take that up next. I.e., there's only so much time to teach students and they have to be taught something that is, by its very nature, at the exclusion of something else. I.e., you can't teach the history of Medieval Japan to 6th graders as that would omit the history of something more important and relevant to their lives, even though the history of Medieval Japan is fascinating.
And that gets to the next point, which we've already noted above. Learning history is vitally important and, in a free society, that's all the more the case. Learning what has happened allows a person to judge what to do now, and forewarns him, to at least some degree, on what may occur in the future.
Indeed, that's why, rather obviously, American students learn American history, and if you are a Wyomingite, you learn at least a little Wyoming history.
And learning that correctly is vitally important to really grasping it, and indeed grasping what's going on now and likely to go on in the future.
And hence the argument.
The argument by people who have introduced the 1619 Project is that American students haven't learned "real" history. As I haven't read the text, I can't judge that, but there's an entire set of works like this that back this view, some of them radically. The most well known example in recent times is A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn, which is popular with the heavily left leaning. Zinn was a Socialist and indeed was suspected of being a Communist in the McCarthy era but denied it. Anyhow, I haven't read the text but a close relative of mine did at one time which resulted in something that's frustrating to historians, even amateur ones, in getting the frequent "did you know?" provided with a fairly extreme interpretation of something that, yes, I knew.
Indeed, I've been getting a little of this recently from a friend who has been reading Jill Lepore's We Hold These Truths. I haven't heard anything that I didn't already know, so I'm not shocked by any thing I'm learning.
That may be because, as a Casper College professor who lead me astray career wise noted, that I have "an analytical mind" and I've never really been willing to accept any historical presentation without analysis. Such is the curse of people with historical minds. And additionally, fwiw, if you are a Catholic, and I am, you are already well aware that American history has tended to omit an entire stream of actions and deeds that don't square well with the national myth. [1].
None of which, ironically means that the national myth doesn't contain essential truths. And all of which means that straight history, with analysis, to the extent we can provide it, is never a bad thing.
The national myth, of course, is that freedom loving American colonists rose up in 1774 to toss out the oppression of British monarchical tyranny, and since that time the country has been dedicated to the proposition of democracy. [2]. Everything we've done since that time, the myth holds, has been to advance the democratic rights of man. I.e. "Liberty"
And there's an element of truth to that.
But there are large elements of falsity to that as well.
It was F. Scott Fitzgerald who stated what is an essential truth here we now need to keep in mind:
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
Said another way, just because people express one ideal, or come to, doesn't mean that they've acted perfectly on them all along. While it is important to judge people on their actions, it is sometimes the case that their thoughts are in fact more significant long term.
When the Continental Congress sent King George III a bill of divorce in 1776, the compliant was much more complicated than some are willing to admit, and the cause much more mixed than the 1776 Project might be willing to consent to. For one thing, among the Intolerable Acts was one complaining of King George III's humanitarian and far sighted prohibition of further westward expansion at the expense of the Native Americans, which the Colonists truly regarded as intolerable. Another one was the allowance of Catholics to keep on practicing their religion in Quebec. So right off the bat there's a problem, as part of what was upsetting those Americans represented by the Continental Congress were things that today we'd largely view as fully squared with American values, not opposed to them.
Indeed, the King wasn't really fully in control of the English government by any means and the English government wasn't being all that heavy handed, although its use of troops in the Colonies was questionable from the onset. The troubles really dated back to the English Civil War and who won it, at first, but they came to a head with the English trying to recoup the expenses of defending the colonies from the French during the Seven Years War, which we took a huge offense to. [3]. There's a lot more to i than that, but it wasn't all about King George being a tyrant, which he wasn't, and Americans wanting to form a republic, which they got around to but which wasn't the original goal.
And then there's slavery.
We've dealt with slavery before so we're not going to do so here in depth. Suffice it to say, however, slavery, and the fact it was race based, is the giant elephant in the room of American history. It always has been, and it still is. The basic question is how can a people that claims to act for the rights of man have so consistently oppressed one (and actually, of course, its more than one) group of people. That's something people have tried to ignore, explain and used against American culture for decades. Explaining it is the task of history. Both ignoring it and using it as a sword against everything American, however, are deep errors.
It's completely true that the United States continued to contain race based slavery until the Civil War, which was about slavery and nothing else, really, and its completely true that the country botched Reconstruction and institutional racism existed in the South up into the 1970s. And to add to that, for most of the country's history, we were conquering the lands of other peoples, namely Native Americans.
At the same time, however, the country did engage in numerous and constant struggles for the radical ideology adopted during the American Revolution. The country was regarded as a threat by European powers right from the onset for holding the radical proposition that people could be freely self governing, something no other nation had tried before. Concepts like avoiding establishing a state religion and allowing for a free press were an anathema to almost every single European power and rightly regarded as radical in the extreme.
So how could this concept exist all that time and Americans fail so badly at it. And what does that mean?
One thing it means is that extreme reactions lack sufficient grounding in history or critical thought to be useful, let alone accurate. In other words, people waiving Confederate flags and demanding a return to "traditional" "America First" values don't understand history in any accurate sense to start with. Nor do those who condemn the United States as a "racist nation" or who state, like Chuck Todd recently did, that the US didn't start trying democracy until the 1960s. Both of these views are way off the mark.
And that's because nations are made of people and people are heavily flawed. Given that, the ideology of a nation can in fact mean more about its overall nature, at any one time, than all of its actions being taken at the same time, although actions matter.
Put another way, it means a lot more, historically, that Nazi Germany had the ideology that it did from 1932 to 1945 than the fact that you can find individual Germans who resisted it. If you could find large numbers of such Germans, which you can't, that would mean another thing. The fact that some did is historically important and interesting, but you can't say that the Third Reich wasn't evil because of them.
Conversely, you can look at the history of the United States and find that it fairly consistently reflects the values it always espoused from early on, even if there's lot of individual failures and even if some of them are both evil and monumental in scope, slavery being the prime example. Put another way, you can't take the Southern rebellion in favor of racism from 1860 to 1865 and then declare that our role in World War Two (or World War One), was somehow evil.
Indeed, defining what would be a fairly absurd proposition down, you also can't claim that our participation in WWI and WWII was motivated by evil even if racist segregation was still the law in the South and even at a Federal level in regard to military recruitment. Yes, those things were wrong, but it doesn't make participation in the war a cause for race based segregation, or indeed, something even associated with it.
All of which gets back to teaching history.
Teaching American history is an exercise in teaching the odd history of a nation with distinct founding ideals that has frequently fallen flatly on its face in regard them, but which has not, perhaps up until right now, abandoned them. Now, however, we have a challenge. On the right, there are those who would force a fictional version of our history in which the US never does anything wrong and any social problems are simply minor notes in an otherwise uniformly rosy history. Others would hold that the US has always been an evil agent of industry and willing to destroy and oppress anyone who isn't a member of the dominant culture.
The scary thing is that we don't seem to be getting along at all. Not since the 1850s-1860s have we been so divided, it seems to me, on an existential level, and the rolling boil that this is creating is boiling out the middle where the truth so often lies. People should keep in mind that, contrary to the frequent assertion, ignorance is not really bliss, and if you really want to destroy your view of how things ought to be, lie about how they were, as sooner or later, the lies told to the young explode in the present and they reject them soundly.
1. Even now classroom instruction at the K-12 level is infused with Protestant myths that reflect the early strongly Protestant origins of the country and the fact that the majority of Americans are Protestants. It's almost impossible to go through school without some teacher trying to tell you something that "the Catholics" did that's a complete and utter myth. Most Catholic students learn to ignore this, but if you are student of history and a Catholic, it does infuse you with a sense of skepticism about the first version of any historical thing you may be told.
2. Which sort of ignores the fact that it took two full years to actually declare independence.
3. Two things of note here.
The first is that the United Kingdom was a democracy at the time, hence the "no taxation without representation" cry of the Colonists. Somehow the fact that the United Kingdom was a democracy, albeit an imperfect one, tends to get missed in the low level discussion on the Revolution even though what this effectively meant is that the Colonists thought they should have seats in the House of Commons, a reasonable view.
Indeed, that sort of view has lead to later revolutions as well. The English would have a really difficult time granting the Irish the right to vote for eons, if they were Catholic, and the French had a terrible time figuring out how to grant the franchise to Algerians. Both of these facts lead to later rebellions, even though by the time the rebellion came about the topic had been solved or was being worked on.
Secondly, the British expecting the Colonies to chip in for the cost of defending them during, as we call it, the French and Indian War really wasn't unreasonable.
