Kids (And Some Adults) Need To Learn That History Is Complicated

The American history curriculum is becoming a political battleground—again. But what students need to learn isn’t that America is “great” or evil; it’s that history is complicated.

For months, Donald Trump has been inveighing against the way American history is taught, charging in a recent speech that schools have become agents of “left-wing indoctrination.” Rather than the “twisted web of lies” being promulgated by teachers, he said, American history has been “an unstoppable chain of events that abolished slavery, secured civil rights, defeated communism and fascism, and built the most fair, equal, and prosperous nation in human history.” He announced that the National Endowment for the Humanities “has awarded a grant to support the development of a pro-American curriculum” and that he plans to establish “a national commission to promote patriotic education.”

As evidence of indoctrination, Trump cited the 1619 Project—an initiative of The New York Times that puts slavery at the center of American history and is used as the basis for a curriculum—along with critical race theory and Howard Zinn’s widely used A People’s History of the United States, first published in 1980.

Those who remember the 1990s may feel they’ve seen this movie before—or some version of it. Back then, the triggering event, in 1994, was the release of national standards for teaching history that could be adopted voluntarily by the states. Funded by a grant from—coincidentally—the National Endowment for the Humanities, the standards were developed by an independent organization. The historian who helped lead the effort, Gary Nash, believed—no doubt like many other academic historians—that it was just as important for students to know that George Washington was a slave owner as that he was a great leader.

The standards came under immediate attack, mostly from the right. Lynne Cheney, who had headed the NEH when the grant was awarded, charged that the finished product reflected an “unqualified admiration for people, places and events that are politically correct” and a disdain for the achievements of the United States. Conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh claimed the standards would teach students that America was “a rotten place” where “they don’t have a chance.” Just as Trump has tried to link history teaching to urban riots, Limbaugh predicted that if the standards were implemented, the result would be “a bunch of embittered people growing up, robbing and stealing and turning to crime.” After months of controversy, the U.S. Senate condemned the standards with only one dissenting vote.

Trump appears to have settled on history education as an issue to rally his base. No doubt we’ll be hearing more speeches like the one he delivered last week, along with arguments on the other side. Here are some points to bear in mind.

The federal government—or any government entity—has little control over the content of history instruction. In the United States, curriculum is a local matter, largely set by school districts with varying degrees of control or guidance from the state. At the elementary level, it’s not uncommon for individual teachers to function without any set curriculum. But even with a theoretically mandated curriculum, teachers often have a great deal of autonomy as to what historical topics to cover and what texts to use.

Conservatives may have won the battle over history standards in 1994, but so far they’ve lost the war: The approach they opposed has only become more widespread and entrenched. In particular, it’s hard to overstate the influence of Zinn’s book, which aims to tell the story of American history “from the bottom up.” With around three million copies sold, it’s widely used in high schools and colleges. According to Stanford history education professor Sam Wineburg, it appears on college reading lists in a range of courses, especially those for future teachers—where it’s sometimes the only history book on the syllabus. If teachers’ views of American history have been shaped by Zinn’s book, it’s not surprising that they choose to use it with their own students.

History needs to be presented in all its complexity. Oversimplification is a problem at both ends of the political spectrum. Those who would paint American history as a virtuous march of progress are clearly missing a lot. But so are those who focus narrowly on the country’s failings—and for many historians, including some on the left, Zinn falls into that category.

Wineburg has argued that, like standard history textbooks, A People’s History glosses over information that doesn’t conform to its argument and ends up substituting “one monolithic reading of the past for another.” Historian Michael Kazin, a stalwart of the left, has called it “bad history” that “reduces the past to a Manichean fable.” Even the New York Times review excerpted on the book’s cover, written by Eric Foner, called it “deeply pessimistic” and “as limited in its own way as history from the top down.”

As Wineburg has observed, students need context to understand history—for example, they need to know that people in the past may have attached entirely different meanings to words we still use. They also need to learn that historical figures are rarely all good or bad. (Obviously, there are exceptions; the fact that Hitler loved his dog need not be emphasized.) This can start early. I’ve seen second graders grapple with the information that Andrew Jackson was both the hero of the Battle of New Orleans and a moving force behind the Trail of Tears.

The basic problem now is that students don’t have a grasp of history, period. Evidence of that is all around us—and it’s not just students. Even the man who holds the highest office in the land has demonstrated a shocking ignorance of history.

One reason is a widespread disdain among educators for facts, including historical facts—dates, places, events. Better, it is thought, to teach kids to “think like a historian.” But historians can think the way they do because they have an enormous amount of factual information stored in their brains. To be sure, history shouldn’t end with factual knowledge, but if doesn’t include it, students are unlikely to come away with real understanding.

Another problem is the near absence of history in the elementary grades, and sometimes the middle grades as well. Many students arrive in high school without ever having been exposed to historical topics in any systematic way. As I’ve seen myself, that, combined with a general unfamiliarity with academic written language, can make it hugely challenging for them to read and understand any high school history text—including Zinn’s, which is far more engagingly written than most. Attempting to tutor one tenth-grader who had been assigned a chapter of the book, I found that the only way I could enable her to understand the couple of paragraphs we were focusing on was to rephrase them in extremely simple language. If teachers have to provide oral summaries—or use the “young people’s” version of the book, which also happens in some high schools—the result is a further simplification of an oversimplified version of history.

The solution: We need to start introducing history in the early grades, and getting students to understand its complexity. Unfortunately, this can’t be accomplished by fiat. The key is to communicate to prospective teachers that history is complex—no easy task—and ensure that, once they’re on the job, they have instructional materials that will help them convey that message to students.

This is surely happening now for some students, but I fear mostly for the minority who are advantaged—like the 16-year-old at a private school who told The Washington Post, “I don’t think that there’s anything that’s so perfect or so evil that we can exclusively love or hate it, especially with something as complex as a country with a history that’s so convoluted.” Perhaps she could teach the president a thing or two.