The failure of young Americans to learn the rudiments of American history is a subject we should expect the American Historical Association — the 140-year-old professional organization of academic historians who live and work in the United States — to regard with the deepest concern. Yet in a statement about history education in public schools published in Time on March 14 the association has nothing to say about this crisis. Instead it seems obsessed with cultural politics.
The statement is a brief look at the findings of what the four authors — three researchers and the association’s executive director — describe as a two-year study of United States history in public schools titled “Mapping the Landscape of Secondary US History Education.” The study includes an appraisal of state standards, a poll reaching out to thousands of middle and high school teachers about their curricula, and interviews of hundreds of administrators and teachers. The aim is to describe what teachers are teaching — or trying to teach — in our American history classrooms.
This sounds like a worthy, though limited, undertaking. It’s made difficult by decentralization and devolution in our management (or lack of management) of history education. “Mapping” is an apt metaphor for a study of what is, indeed, a very confused and confusing enterprise, difficult to grasp even on a state or local level and resistant to generalizations on a national one.
We have a federal department of education, state departments of education, state history standards mandated by legislatures, state, district, and county social studies supervisors, and national and state institutions for the promotion of history, but what gets taught often comes down to choices individual teachers make. History teachers may feel constrained by state standards and standardized tests but they enjoy more discretion than peers who teach other academic subjects. The result is that American history education involves an extraordinary variety of materials, approaches, and subjects.
Textbooks, for all their flaws — even the best are turgid — once offered teachers a general outline, but the researchers find that only thirty percent of teachers use textbooks at all. Many of them treat their textbooks as reference works.
Instead of textbooks, most teachers report relying heavily on the internet, drawing on lessons and other classroom resources available online. Hundreds of organizations have rushed to post these materials, ranging from widely respected ones like the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the Bill of Rights Institute, and the American Battlefield Trust to state historical societies, museums, libraries, and lineage organizations.
They offer their wares, mostly for free, in an effort to support and shape history education. Some of these materials are controversial, like the “1619 Project Curriculum” funded by the Pulitzer Center and promoted by the New York Times, which seeks to “re-center” American history education around racism. Most are not controversial and simply offer teachers materials generated by specialists.
A study of state standards combined with teacher polls and interviews is a study of prescriptions and good intentions, not outcomes. National assessments of basic knowledge in American history conducted over the last generation — by independent agencies hoping, no doubt, for good outcomes — report dismal results. The statement doesn’t address these assessments, nor suggest whether the decentralization and devolution — the lack of effective direction and oversight it says is pervasive — contribute to failure.
The authors conclude that the lack of central authority insulates history education, to a large degree, from ideological controversy. Contrary to what many on the far left say, our history classes aren’t fundamentally racist. And contrary to the worry of moderate and conservative Americans, it isn’t dominated by identity politics, fixated on race, ethnicity, and gender, and doesn’t divide Americans between oppressors and victims, undermine understanding and appreciation of our Constitution and national identity, discourage patriotism, or teach young Americans to despise their country.
“The good news,” the authors insist, “is that neither of these panicked portrayals are accurate.” (That should be ‘neither . . . is accurate.’)
“We always knew that teachers don’t really teach critical race theory in their classrooms” the association’s executive director, Dr. James Grossman, said in an interview. If he means that in a literal sense — lessons explaining theory — he’s undoubtedly right. But what concerns so many Americans is that ideas rooted in critical race theory are applied broadly across American history education.
The statement is hard on “partisan pundits” the authors say are misleading their audiences and red state critics they contend are bullying teachers away from “perfectly good lessons by the rolling threats of activists who accuse educators of liberal indoctrination.” They also glare briefly at activist administrators in blue states who demand ideological conformity to “their particular vision of progressive antiracism,” though they don’t seem to object to “progressive antiracism” in general. “Media accounts of a politically charged war for the soul of social studies,” they add, “are overblown.”
The American Historical Association has announced, in effect, that we should move along. There’s nothing to see here. Ideological partisans aren’t taking over our history classrooms.
Should we trust its assurances?
Not if we’re prudent. The American Historical Association is formally non-partisan, but it represents a profession dominated by people on the political left — many on the far left — who don’t distinguish between the history they write and teach and political activism. The association has long reflected their views. Its pose in the present instance as a neutral, objective analyst simply isn’t credible. Asking us to take its word for anything on faith contradicts a basic principle of the historian’s craft: present evidence before announcing conclusions.
“The typical American history classroom,” the authors nonetheless assure us, “is neither awash in white supremacy nor awoke with critical race theory.”
That statement is worrisome, because it sets up a false equivalence between white supremacists and antiracists — and leaves no space between for mainstream Americans who are worried that students aren’t learning much history at all.
Except in the overheated imaginations of the far left, white supremacists (thank goodness) have no role in shaping what gets taught. Critical race theorists, on the other hand, have a role — in recent years a considerable one — in shaping curricula and education policy in many jurisdictions.
Indeed they get paid handsomely for it. The school system in Fairfax County, Virginia — one of the ten largest in the nation — paid “antiracist scholar” Ibram Kendi $20,000 to talk for an hour to teachers and administrators. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in North Carolina — among the twenty largest — paid him $25,000 to appear in a video interview shown to teachers and administrators. Although revelations about Kendi’s mismanagement of his Center for Antiracist Research have sullied his reputation and exposed him to critics who regard him as a grifter, school systems large and small continue to institutionalize aspects of his “antiracist” ideology. Many schools systems list the deeply flawed “1619 Project curriculum,” which treats anti-black racism as the central theme in American history, as a resource for history educators.
Other practices based on, shaped by, or closely related to critical race theory are now common in school systems, including the ubiquitous practices of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” most of which are predicated on the irrational assumption that disparate outcomes are by definition the result of systemic racism, sexism, and other forms of unethical discrimination rather than differences in ability, effort, and merit.
The American Historical Association itself has embraced such practices. Its “History Gateways” initiative, which focuses on student performance in college survey courses, is predicated on the assumption that the much higher failure rate among black students enrolled in these courses demonstrates that the courses are “inequitable” and must be changed. The association’s executive director frankly describes the initiative as an effort to “reconsider, rethink, and redesign introductory history courses in the interest of equitable student outcomes.”
Millions of Americans, and not simply those on the far right, believe that critical race theory and related ideas are tools of radical bigotry that use obscure jargon to disguise an insidious form of anti-white racism. Given the very public way in which schools have embraced this spectrum of ideas, the contention that they don’t influence what happens in the history classroom strains belief. The “pundits” the statement criticizes seem to be articulating valid concerns. The association needs to show moderate and conservative Americans the evidence that their worries are misplaced.
But let’s assume for a moment that the American Historical Association is right — that critical race theory does not influence public school history classrooms in the way its most strenuous critics contend. That doesn’t mean that resistance to critical race theory dominating history classrooms should relax. It suggests resistance has been at least somewhat successful and continued vigilance — if not redoubled effort — is required.
The history classroom is no place for political indoctrination of any variety. Efforts to make it one — and the ensuing controversies — distract us from the central problem of history education in our public schools: it is failing to develop historical literacy among young Americans. The American Historical Association statement doesn’t acknowledge this. It claims, instead, that “today, teachers have access to resources that give students a more sophisticated understanding than ever of what it means to think, read, write, and argue like a historian.”
The resources are unquestionably available, in unprecedented richness and variety, but the claim that students have “a more sophisticated understanding than ever” of historical analysis and exposition defies the available evidence.
Twelve years ago, the late David McCullough warned: “We are raising children in America today who are by and large historically illiterate.”
His warning caught many people by surprise. David McCullough had such a warm and winning manner, usually positive and optimistic, but he was alarmed. “I ran into some students on university campuses who were bright and attractive and likeable,” he said.
I was just stunned by how much they didn’t know. One young woman at a university in the Midwest came up to me after one of my talks and said that until she heard me speak that morning she’d never understood that the original thirteen colonies were all on the East Coast. And I thought, ‘What are we doing that’s so wrong, so pathetic?’ I tried it again at several other places, colleges and universities, same thing.
We all ought to share his alarm. Little has happened in the last twelve years to improve the situation.
