The past, the present and the redacted
Why do people care so much about how U.S. history is taught?
Two hands hold a burning book. The U.S. has a long history of creating textbooks to fit certain narratives about historical events. // Illustration by Julia Vreeman.
Johann Neem sits at his desk overlooking Red Square. The sounds of Fisher Fountain splashing and students conversing can be heard from Neem’s open window. His office walls are lined with shelves filled with books from floor to ceiling.
As a professor in Western Washington University’s history department, Neem focuses on the early American Republic and the history of education. With this knowledge, he can give context to an ongoing culture war: how the U.S. should teach and educate the masses about its history.
As of May 18 this year, 23 bills across the nation that restrict the ideas state entities and public schools can discuss have been signed into law, according to PEN America’s Educational Gag Order Tracker. Many of these bills prohibit K-12 schools from promoting anti-racist ideas, which regulates how social studies educators can talk about topics such as slavery and colonization.
Idaho, for example, signed a bill in 2021 that specifically bans public schools and higher education institutions from directing students to adopt or affirm the tenets of “critical race theory.” Critical race theory is defined as a framework of legal analysis that holds that racism is inherent in U.S. law and legal institutions.
Similarly, Georgia passed the “Protect Students First Act,” a bill that bans K-12 schools from promoting ideas related to race and U.S. history such as, “The United States of America is fundamentally racist.”
However, this culture war is nothing new.
“It has always been a controversial topic,” Neem said. “This tension, not just about race, but about what and how to socialize children, goes way back.”
Neem gave the example of how after the Civil War, Southern states began creating their own history textbooks in response to Northern textbook publishers’ anti-slavery orientation. Although people have always argued about how to teach U.S. history, ultimately, it’s about what story to tell, Neem said.
But why is it such a big deal now?
Neem said some people on the left believe U.S. history is a story centered around racism with no redeeming qualities. Neems calls this perspective the “post-American perspective” in his article “A Usable Past for a Post-American Nation.” He notes the post-American perspective was created from a calling to achieve racial equality and support a diverse population.
“But you can imagine if you’re someone who doesn’t share that perspective, it means that almost all of American history is corrupted, and is unsalvageable. And that puts us in a tense falling,” Neem said.
In May 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, Black Lives Matter protests broke out in cities across the country. These protests increased the public’s awareness of antiracist ideas, according to research published in the “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.”
Neem names these protests as one of the factors contributing to the current push to change how the U.S. teaches its history.
“In the context of schools and universities, you also have bureaucracies that are very left-leaning and often in states where the policymakers, like in Florida, are right-leaning, so you have a partisan tension between who controls those institutions and who doesn’t,” Neem said.
This tension between conflicting perspectives has also been an opportunity for some people on the right to push for the privatization of public schools.
“It allows people who have been wanting to take down the public schools to have an opportunity to really foster even greater distrust in the schools,” Neem said. “So it’s advantageous politically, you know, for Republicans to talk about the extremism of the public schools.”
The education side of the story
In the U.S., social studies standards are the main factor that influences U.S. history education in K-12 public schools. In terms of federal social studies standards, there are none. There are only state standards, which can vary depending on where you are and are often set by state boards of education or state offices of public instruction.
In 2020, after doing a two-month-long investigation into state social studies standards on Black history, CBS News found that different stories were being told throughout the country. Seven states do not directly mention slavery in their standards and 16 states list states’ rights as a cause of the Civil War, they said in their findings.
Washington state’s social studies standards do mention that students, by the eighth grade, should be able to explain how slavery, expansion, removal, and reform defined the 1801–1850 time period. The standards also mention slavery and the Civil Rights Movement in sample questions for sixth through eighth grade as well as ninth through 12th grade standards.
“Critical thinking is a skill that, when it comes to learning history, can really only be taught when you’re taught controversy and that there are multiple sides to every story,” said Edward Wissing, a social studies teacher at Sehome High School. “If you try to teach history with a single narrative, you’re losing a sense of what history really is, which is its competing narratives.”
Similar to Neem, Wissing also recognizes that the current education culture war is nothing new.
“And yet, it doesn’t make it feel any better to me as a teacher, because in the end, it’s the American public that suffers if our students aren’t adequately educated,” he said.
Wissing has been teaching social studies for 17 years and currently teaches AP World History, U.S. History and AP European History. He hopes that when students leave his class, they become engaged citizens.
“I just want them to feel like they, that they, belong in the community that they’re in… When I say engage, it could be part of a trails association or coach a little league team or tutor at an after-school center,” Wissing said. “Cultivating community and living in a place that you feel connected to is important to me.”
The future of the past
The current culture war over U.S. history boils down to what stories people should be taught. Schools and what they teach have the power to shape the cultures and values of future generations. Shaping and educating our youth starts on a community level and with enough time can expand nationwide.
People in the U.S. learn how to be American through certain historical narratives, which makes challenging those narratives and identity hard for people, Neem said.
“When we teach history we’re trying to make Americans… and we’re also simultaneously trying to teach history so people know the truth. Then we can right wrongs of the past and we can make decisions in the present based on good knowledge,” Neem said. “And those things are in tension with each other. But they’re both valuable projects.”
However, Neem finds that there is no one answer to balancing those two projects. But censoring is not one of those answers.
“I think if you try to legislate what the narrative should be, then that’s not really history anymore. Just indoctrination,” Wissing said.
Neem warns against looking at U.S. history as a ‘truth versus lies’ narrative, which is how it has been framed recently. Instead, it should be seen as a complicated story with multiple truths, meaning historical events shouldn’t be reduced to one thing or another.
For instance, Neem gives the example of the “The 1619 Project,” an ongoing project by the New York Times. This project reduced the American Revolution to a slaveholder’s revolt, but it’s much more complicated than that. While he recognizes that it is true that some slaveholders in the South supported the revolution because the British threatened their ownership of enslaved people, people in other areas were also supporting the revolution for other reasons.
“If we just say ‘well, this is the true story, and this is not,’ it’s not any more of a full story,” he said. “It’s inaccurate when we do that, and so that’s why I think this ‘truth versus lies’ framework gets the left in trouble because often their truths are partial and exaggerated just like the right’s are.”
Ultimately, we live in a democracy. A democracy where citizens can voice their thoughts and influence the government. To Neem, citizens should take ownership of education in a democracy.
Citizens should and always will argue about the curriculum because schools are where people send their children and that is where they’re taught certain values and narratives. While it’s messy, Neem said it’s not bad to argue (to a reasonable extent).
“You want there to be a place at least where the citizens can participate in that process. And make choices and deliberate and argue with each other,” he said. “You know, it’s okay, for citizens to disagree on some of these issues. That’s how democracy works.”