Teaching History in America
Email response by Col Mike Walker, USMC (retired)
Harry,
Thanks for the Wall Street Journal post below.
The teaching of U.S. History over the last century has evolved from "cheerleading" (George Washington never told a lie, etc) to "warts and all" history to (borrowing Jeane Kirkpartick's phrase) "Hate America First" history.
I have always been beholden to "warts and all" history as seeking truth over advocacy - no matter how imperfectly - always lands one in a superior ethical and moral position.
The problem facing secondary history education in America today is not simply the shameful influence of the dishonest "Hate America First" advocates.
Another major problem is that World History is largely stuck in the "cheerleading" teaching era.
Students (falsely) assume that World History books are objective and truthful (i.e. they are getting a "warts and all" presentation).
In reality, the historical "warts" of other places are buried or often outright eliminated while American historical "warts" are placed at the center of the instruction.
For example, did you know that the country that imported the greatest number of slaves from Africa was Brazil? It was simple geography: short sea trips to an eager market meant greater profits for the slave traders.
As a result, American students cannot but conclude that the United States is terribly lacking and inferior to other nations and cultures.
This teaching wrong does a tremendous disservice to the students as there is not a place on earth that does not possess a rich expanse of historical "warts."
When World History is truthfully presented with its "warts" on display in equal measure, a clearer understanding of U.S. History is inescapable.
That failure combined with the "Hate America First" dishonesty is what makes teaching secondary history in America a less than ideal undertaking.
Mike
The College Board’s about-face on U.S. history is a significant political event.
By DANIEL HENNINGER WSJ Aug. 26, 2015
In this summer of agitated discontent for American conservatives, we can report a victory for them, assuming that is still permitted.
Last year, the College Board, the nonprofit corporation that controls all the high-school Advanced Placement courses and exams, published new guidelines for the AP U.S. history test. They read like a left-wing dream. Obsession with identity, gender, class, crimes against the American Indian and the sins of capitalism suffused the proposed guidelines for teachers of AP American history.
As of a few weeks ago, that tilt in the guidelines has vanished. The College Board’s rewritten 2015 teaching guidelines are almost a model of political fair-mindedness. This isn’t just an about-face. It is an important political event.
The earlier guidelines characterized the discovery of America as mostly the story of Europeans bringing pestilence, destructive plants and cultural obliteration to American Indians. The new guidelines put it this way: “Mutual misunderstandings between Europeans and Native Americans often defined the early years of interaction and trade as each group sought to make sense of the other. Over time, Europeans and Native Americans adopted some useful aspects of each other’s culture.”
Opinion Journal Video Wonder Land Columnist Dan Henninger on why the nonprofit revised its Advanced Placement History exam for high-school students. Photo credit: Associated Press. The previous, neo-Marxist guidelines said, “Students should be able to explain how various identities, cultures, and values have been preserved or changed in different contexts of U.S. history, with special attention given to the formation of gender, class, racial, and ethnic identities.” That has been removed. The revised guidelines have plenty about “identity” but nothing worth mounting a Super PAC to battle.
Also new: “The effort for American independence was energized by colonial leaders such as Benjamin Franklin, as well as by popular movements that included the political activism of laborers, artisans, and women.” The earlier version never suggested the existence of Franklin—or Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison or anyone resembling a Founding Father. Now they’re back. Even the Federalist Papers were fished out of the memory hole.
Most incredible of all, the private enterprise system is, as they say, reimagined as a force for good: “As the price of many goods decreased, workers’ real wages increased, providing new access to a variety of goods and services.” There’s an idea that has fallen out of favor the past six years.
The final sentence of my June 11 column on the previous guidelines, “Bye, Bye, American History,” said: “The College Board promises that what it produces next month will be ‘balanced.’ We await the event.”
The College Board delivered on its promise. The new guidelines, which convey an understanding of American history to thousands of high-school students, are about as balanced as one could hope for. The framework itself, on the College Board website inside the AP tab, is worth a look.
What happened?
To Bernie-Sanders progressives, what happened was a sellout. For ThinkProgress.org, “College Board Caves to Conservative Pressure.”
What really happened was the resurrection of an American idea the left wants to extinguish—federalism. Some states began to push back. Legislative opposition to the guidelines formed in Georgia, Oklahoma, North Carolina, Nebraska, Tennessee, Colorado and Texas.
Stanley Kurtz, of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, has argued that the College Board was concerned that its lucrative nationwide testing franchise would be at risk if states began to replace it with their own courses. I think he’s right.
What remains, however, is that the College Board, after somehow thinking it could produce a politically tendentious document that would have established “identity politics” as the official narrative of U.S. history, ended up with a set of guidelines that deftly straddles the political center.
This is a significant event. It marks an important turn in the American culture wars that exploded at the Republican convention in 1992 with the religious right, a movement that faded but whose sense of political alienation has remained alive, whether in the original tea-party groups or today with voters adopting the improbable Donald Trump.
What these disaffected people have held in common is the sense that their animating beliefs in—if one may say so—God and country were not merely being opposed but were being rolled completely off the table by institutions—“Washington,” the courts, a College Board—over which they had no apparent control.
They were not wrong.
The original AP U.S. history guidelines were a case study in the left’s irrepressible impulse, here or elsewhere, to always go too far. The left always said it just wanted “to be heard.” They were, but it was never enough. The goal was to make the American center-right simply shut up. Now, with campus trigger-warnings and microagression manias, the left is telling liberals to shut up too. They rule, and you do. Ask the Little Sisters of the Poor.
Guess what? In a country of 319 million “diverse” people, that is really a hard political goal to lock down, no matter how many institutions are captured.
Is the country polarized? How could it not be? Is there a solution? Take a look at how the AP U.S. history mess was handled. Someone rewrote those guidelines into a reasonable political accommodation. It is not impossible.
Write to henninger@wsj.com.
