How History Class Divides Us
In September in a room where someone had conspicuously placed a Confederate flag for at least part of the proceedings, the Texas board of education sat through two days of public hearings on a “streamlining” of its 2010 social studies standards.
Panels of teachers had proposed hundreds of changes, but the most controversial was to delete a line of the standard on the Alamo referencing “all the heroic defenders who gave their lives there.” Swift condemnation from politicians and the public followed, forcing the panels to restore some of that language even before the hearings concluded.
Much has been written about the Alamo’s relative historic importance in the story of the United States, but that wasn’t even the point of this debate. What was truly at stake were the underlying values proponents felt it signaled: What defines American thought and action? What can students take pride in?
It’s easy to lose sight of the connection between what students learn in history and the civic ideals and values those topics communicate, especially since they tend to be treated as different disciplines in K-12 education.
But the Texas debate reminds us that history and civic values are deeply intertwined, and gives rise to this interesting question: What if the inability of Americans to agree on our shared history—and on the right way to teach it—is a cause of our current polarization and political dysfunction, rather than a symptom? It’s a question that gets right to the issues of what constitutes facts, how to interpret them, and how they inform contemporary debates, all of which are key themes as America experiences a kind of civic crisis.
Public trust in the government is near its historic low. And in 2017, Americans were far more politically polarized on topics like immigration and healthcare than in the early 2000s, according to Gallup. Journalists are now routinely assailed by politicians. The bruising confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court led The Washington Post to speculate that even “our least damaged institution” might now be viewed with increasing levels of skepticism.
“If this polyglot country doesn’t have a set of ideals and a broad narrative, we don’t have much of a hope,” said Sam Wineburg, a professor of education and history at Stanford University, whose recent volume attempts to connect the dots between history education and citizenship. “It is not popular to talk about in an era of identity politics, but history teaching in school has a civic purpose, not only a disciplinary purpose.”
It may seem counterintuitive to argue that schools’ role in helping remedy this toxic situation for future generations depends at least in part on how they teach about the past.
From a purely pragmatic standpoint, though, students encounter U.S. history far more frequently in school, including generally a year in high school compared to just a semester devoted to civics. ...