Teaching History in Polarized Times

This week's article summary is New National Civics Guidelines Carve a Middle Path.

Historically (pun intended) history teachers have gotten a bad rap. The common joke is history teacher is the job the football coach has to make him a full-time employee—sit at your desk drinking your coffee, let the kids read the textbook on their own, and use the teacher’s edition for activities, assignments, and test questions.

What once was a quaint, low-stress job is a minefield today as the article below attests. 

I like the premise of the new history guidelines below: history should be viewed through the lens of ‘reflective patriotism’ as we compare our country’s ideals with its reality.

While the polarized times we live in seem as if we will never be able to find common ground, we need to remember that there have been many times in our country’s history where bitter partisanship dominated, the Civil War and the 1960s being two prime examples.

I agree with the article’s hope that we as teachers, even in the younger grades of Trinity, can guide our students to be thinkers who practice open inquiry, can see the grayness and ambiguity of life, and can avoid the zero-sum, right-wrong, win-lose paradigm many favor today.

To me, our country, like all of us, are works in progress--imperfect but striving to get better every day.  

Joe

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 Is America a land of freedom and opportunity, a shining civic example of government by and for the people? 

Or is it a system built on oppression and disenfranchisement that’s forced marginalized peoples to fight for full participation?

A new set of K-12 history and civics guidelines tries to find a middle ground between the competing narratives by posing the question: What if it’s both?

The “Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy” guidelines are part of an ambitious project to reverse decades of neglect of the social studies. But they also come in perhaps the most difficult era the discipline has ever faced and will likely face intense scrutiny as a result.

Unprecedented levels of polarization and the seismic political and social events of 2020 have turned the social studies field into the most explosive curriculum area in K-12 education.

Debates rage over provocative new retellings of the American story, like The New York Times’ 1619 Project, and more familiar, idealistic, even sanitized narratives like those favored by former President Trump’s now-disbanded 1776 Commission.

The new guidelines center on the idea of “reflective patriotism”: that students should learn to feel committed to this country and the ideals it purports to represent, while also questioning, critiquing, and holding the powerful to account when it fails to live up to those ideals.

Students should learn about the importance of civic participation, the founding of American democracy, and the notion that civil disagreement is baked into the U.S. Constitution and is part of the American experiment, they state.

The guidelines stress that a lack of civics knowledge is a problem for our education system at all levels. 

The guidelines prioritize inquiry into the nation’s complicated and contested founding and evolution.

The 40-page draft outlines key concepts, thematic “driving questions” for student inquiry, and more-specific sample guiding questions.

While the draft does reference some contentious issues, including the forced removal of Indigenous people and the institution of enslavement, many of the driving questions are conceptual. 

Throughout students’ K-12 education, the guidelines say, they should be using critical inquiry skills to engage with all the rich conceptual questions kicked up by the founding of America. For example, how does the idea of “We the People” change over time? Which moments of change have most defined the country’s evolution and that of its political institutions? What kinds of stories tell us who we are and where we’re from?

As for who is part of that civic life, the roadmap uses two definitions of the word citizen. The guidelines discuss the rights granted to those considered legal citizens of the United States, but also engage with the idea of a citizen as someone who contributes to a community, whatever their age or legal status. 

All of these choices make room to teach both traditional civics topics like voting and government structure, while also engaging with “action civics,” an approach that explores how people can identify issues that are important to them and make change.