Before starting my actual thoughts on this subject, two author’s notes.
1) I’m not an expert on K-12 education across America, and I won’t pretend to be one. This essay therefore focuses more on my personal experience and anecdotal evidence than on statistics or features common to the Common Core or Texas Education Agency as a whole. If you’re looking for a data-backed argument applicable to the entire US, skip this article. This is entirely informed by my own experiences.
2) This isn’t intended as a personal attack or insult towards anyone. If I criticize a teacher, author, or course, it’s a commentary on their ideas and intellectual rigor rather than an attack on them as a person. Didn’t think this would be necessary, but we live in an era of increased sensitivity to criticism…
With that out of the way, on with the actual post.
Social studies differs from other school subjects in that it serves no purpose for students’ career advancement and is instead taught for nobler causes like the enrichment of the mind and the improvement of society. I will focus here on the goal of improving society. To my mind, the logic behind US history education being good for American society is as follows. Students learn about the past and the good things, as well as bad things, that have been done so that they can ‘learn from the past:’ a broad-strokes economic history so students learn the dangers of both laissez-faire capitalism and doctrinaire socialism, an understanding of how social prejudices have shaped some of the most inhumane government policies in America, how US foreign policy has both harmed and helped the world depending on its objectives, etc. Then students should be taught a sense of responsibility and love towards the country so they are determined to apply this knowledge and invest themselves in the slow forwards march of human progress.
This strategy has failed on two fronts, simultaneously being inadequate in imparting lessons from the past and failing to instill a sense of civic responsibility.
The inadequacy in teaching content stems from several factors, but most prominent in my experience is the biases of teachers and their tendency to give undue emphasis to certain topics. The strongest example of this is the poor teaching of economic history. In my 14000+ hours spent in an AP US History (APUSH) class, I can’t recall a single instance in which socialist economic ideas received scrutiny, criticism, or any thought beyond blind praise. In contrast, laissez-faire capitalism was the subject of many hours of denigration and moralizing from my teacher. We received countless lectures on the dangers of monopolies and labor exploitation, contrasted with the virtues of unions, price controls, and trust-busting; never, however, did we hear about the ties the Teamsters had to Mafia bosses, how Standard Oil and other ‘evil’ monopolies brought reductions to oil prices and economic growth, or how Wisconsin’s Potter Law imposed price controls on rail fares so stringent that it wiped out railroad companies’ profits and brought railroad expansion to a halt in the state (this law was actually praised by our teacher).
The framings of economic issues were simplistic and closer to propaganda than pedagogy. We were shown countless examples of corruption involving large monopolies, with nothing said of their contributions to affordability and creating jobs, and then asked whether we felt Rockefeller, Carnegie, etc. were “robber baron or captain of industry.” The entire class, barring myself, answered “robber baron,” and the teacher then gave a cryptic smile and moved on, satisfied that her flock was sufficiently in line with her own beliefs. There is a strong argument that these men were “robber barons,” but they also did many great things for the world, and it’s poor teaching to only highlight one side of that story and promote a simplistic “eat the rich” narrative. Incidents like this show a tendency towards ideological conformity and dogmatic thinking that is often encouraged by APUSH teachers, contributing to a weaker understanding of economic history.
Granted, laissez-faire capitalism has historically been harmful to large segments of the American population, quite possibly more so than the excesses of socialism. However, the emphasis on this topic is disproportionately high compared to the complete neglect of socialist excesses. Students graduating from my school, and likely countless others across the US, are receiving a warped worldview in which economic ideologies exist in a Manichaean split between socialism and laissez-faire capitalism – no middle ground is presented as a possibility in high school. There are no lessons on the importance of curbing regulatory bodies and unions, only lessons on curbing monopolies and billionaires. The consequence of this is an uninformed electorate with a poor understanding of economic history and how it can inform decision-making today. No single course can be blamed for the dismal state of American education as a whole, but the poor teaching of US history certainly has played a role in many students graduating high school with little understanding of economics beyond a militant “eat the rich” mentality.
The negative impact of instructors’ biases on the quality of US history education goes far beyond economic history. The oppression of African Americans is a consistent theme throughout the APUSH curriculum, and the reform movements aimed at correcting this are glorified. While there is deserved praise for the nonviolent Civil Rights Movement, there are also some gaping blind spots in the curriculum. The Black Panthers were never mentioned in class and only once in the AMSCO textbook, and the only race riots ever mentioned in class were those in which white people could easily be blamed for the violence, such as the Tulsa race massacre – never did we learn about the 1965 Watts riots or the 1992 orgy of violence and looting that followed the killing of Rodney King. Similarly, our course criticized the Palmer raids and federal government surveillance of leftist activists, but never were we taught about the bouts of anarchist violence that motivated the government’s paranoia – two things can be true at the same time, but our history education did a poor job of acknowledging that fact. The isolated instances of anarchist violence or African American-led race riots don’t justify or erase the wrongs done by the federal government, but it is important to acknowledge both of these processes to have a complete understanding of American history. Beyond purely pedagogical concerns, it’s just irresponsible and morally repugnant to gloss over the wrongs committed by certain communities while bashing others, and then providing justifications along the lines of “natural reaction to oppression” for violence committed by groups one personally supports.
My APUSH teacher went so far as to suggest that the bomb thrown in the Haymarket Affair might not have actually been thrown by a supporter of the labor protest; to this day, I’m unsure if she was making the extraordinary suggestion that the police threw a bomb at their own men to get a reason to shoot protesters. Incidents like this exhibit the amount of mental gymnastics often done in US history courses to glorify all protest movements and avoid discussing the violence or refusal to compromise often exhibited by them. Many young Democrats’ refusal to acknowledge the excesses of the Black Lives Matter movement (commended in class by my teacher despite their purported neutrality) is a prominent manifestation of this failure in education; after being taught that the violence of the proletariat is a myth, and that when it does exist it is justified by years of oppression, it’s no wonder that kids can’t come to terms with how a well-meaning movement can often be hijacked and turned destructive, to the detriment of the movement and the US as a whole. Even more disturbing is the large contingent of Luigi Mangione fans present at my school and among Gen Z as a whole – 14000+ hours of US history education, and all they’ve learnt is that shooting CEOs is a productive way of effecting social change. Perhaps there were some blind spots in the curriculum after all…
The instinctive explanation for these shortcomings is that a two-semester course can only fit so much into its time, and that these blind spots are the result of limited time rather than biases or mal-intent. However, this does not compute with my experience dealing with lectures on all manner of esoteric topics chosen at the whim of the teacher rather than integrality to passing the AP exam. We spent a considerable portion of class time on rhetorical and visual analysis, where we interpreted two stray dogs in the corner of a painting as symbols for class struggle or Reagan’s every ‘um’ and ‘ah’ as a rhetorical appeal to Christian values, and we listened to lectures on cults (all right-wing of course), Appalachian culture (hours spent staring at quilts my grandmother could produce with a youtube tutorial), and the teacher’s various other hobby horses. The undue emphasis on certain topics isn’t because of time constraints, but rather because of teachers and curriculum makers’ own ideological leanings and ulterior motives.
The biased teaching of economic history and protest movements has been damaging to many students’ understanding of US history and, by corollary, their ability to make informed decisions about contemporary issues in politics. If one of the goals of history education was producing a more informed electorate, this model is certainly a failure. On one side of the spectrum is Alabama, where students learn that white people colonized a completely empty land without killing anyone and that everyone has always had a good time in America thanks to the benevolence of Jesus and the American government; on the other side is the circus I have just described, in which left-leaning teachers and textbook authors have created a generation of kids following another dogmatic and distorted version of history. If I had to choose, I’d much prefer this slightly-left-leaning mess over Alabama’s dystopian factory of ignorance, but the incompetence of one system doesn’t excuse that of another.
The second major shortcoming of US history courses is the failure to instill a sense of patriotism and civic responsibility in students. There is curently heated debate over this topic, and many political commentators argue this isn’t the duty of the education system to teach these things. However, I see little value in a thorough understanding of history if it is unaccompanied by a love for one’s country and a sense of obligation to apply this knowledge towards its improvement. The education system today receives more funding and expert advice than ever before in US history, yet voter apathy is at a peak and many of America’s bright young scholars show zero interest in voting, discussing politics, or doing anything remotely useful with their social studies education, seen as a distraction from the vastly more important STEM education that leads to a six-figure salary. This can’t be blamed on history courses alone, but they certainly carry a part of the blame. If teaching facts and ‘history’ was the sole purpose of US history education, then the subject would be completely segregated from a larger goal of improving society and strengthening democracy. Therefore, the teaching of patriotic values and civic responsibility is as necessary to US history courses as teaching history itself.
On this front also, high school US history courses have failed, even more spectacularly than in the dimension of actual course content. Most of my APUSH course’s lecture time was spent listing out all the horrible things America has done to African Americans, Native Americans, immigrants, and women; when positive steps forward like the 15th Amendment or Civil Rights Act were discussed, it was almost in passing and always with a mountain of caveats added on to remind students that, even when America does something good, it’s never good enough to merit praise. Granted, civil rights legislation has never been perfect and gaps in enforcement are an issue, but there were achievements nonetheless – listening to my APUSH teacher, it would feel like America is still in the same place today that it was 250 years ago. This negative attitude teaches students pessimism and apathy, rather than inspiring them to follow in the footsteps of the social reformers of history and try to make their own positive impact.
It’s hard to list specific incidents in the course as evidence for this problem because this is more a matter of tone and relative emphasis on different topics than of easily-quotable parts of lectures. However, based on my assessment, this was a significant problem in my APUSH course. I entered the year already a bit pessimistic about the future of the country, due to previous knowledge of the government’s misdeeds, the disappointment of recent political developments, and negative personal experiences; rather than working as a source of inspiration to believe in change and work for it, this course further demotivated me and almost turned my pessimism into hate for the country as a whole. Despite the multitude of inspiring people and movements in history, there was a general attitude of indifference among students throughout the year; although part of this can be blamed on low attention spans and preexisting apathy towards the social sciences, this also reflects a failing on the part of the education system to make history education inspiring. By trivializing the achievements of reform movements and constantly bashing the American government, teachers risk killing students’ belief in the possibility of change and the importance of fighting for it.
I suspect part of the issue is that the pendulum has swung too far in the clash between two narratives of US history. Leftist historians such as Howard Zinn gained enormous popularity at one point of time because they countered a misleading narrative of American exceptionalism similar to Alabama schools’ story of all minorities having a jolly time in America. However, in countering one genre of biased historical narratives, Zinn and his ilk have created yet another genre in which American history is a never-ending saga of class struggle and tragedy, where every reform movement was insufficient and there is nothing to celebrate in the 250 years of independent America. The overly negative US history education I received is part of a larger problem of left-leaning historians and teachers swinging too far in the opposite direction when challenging the dominant narrative of America being the land of milk and honey; while this country has never been perfect and its government has done many horrible things in the last 250 years, that doesn’t justify teachers transferring their personal pessimism and hatred for the government to students.
Traditionally, teachers have tried to motivate and inspire students with the example of great leaders in history: George Washington and Abraham Lincoln used to be in vogue, but now their thoughts on African Americans are too controversial among many leftists for their achievements to deserve recognition, so more recent favorites include Martin Luther King Jr. and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. However, this emphasis on inspiring figures was almost completely missing in my APUSH course, in line with the generally pessimistic and negative attitude. Although MLK and Stanton were treated as positive forces in history, the significantly larger emphasis given to negative historical developments diminished whatever inspirational value they might have had. I am not a proponent of role models or hero-worshipping, since most historical figures have had some personal flaws or prejudices; however, I believe there is value in recognizing some people as inspiring, even if ‘with warts and all,’ and a failure to do so results in increasingly apathetic, demotivated youth.
While it’s hard to quantify the impact of this attitude on students, some educated guesses can be made. A large number of young Americans are uninterested in politics and don’t think it can do anything positive for the country – schools with the left-leaning pessimism described above are likely contributing to this issue and hurting kids’ will to engage with democracy and do good with what they’ve learned in class. There is little value to having a deep understanding of US history if the last time you apply it in your life is the AP exam at the end of 11th grade – on this issue rests the crux of why instilling patriotic values and a sense of civic responsibility is essential to US history education, an element that is painfully absent at the moment.
These problems aren’t universal to schools in America; red states have a diametrically opposite version of this mess, with the same issues except from the opposite end of the political spectrum, and in blue states, I’ve heard much more positive reviews of the APUSH course from some students who had better, or perhaps less biased, teachers. However, I do think these problems exist in a sizable number of US history classes, even if not a majority. The AMSCO textbook commonly used in APUSH courses suffers from the ideological biases and blind spots I outlined above with respect to economic history, race relations, and the violence of many leftist political movements. Even more worrying is that a number of schools are using Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” as their US history textbook, despite the academic consensus that it suffers heavily from Zinn’s own confirmation bias, i.e. his desire to morph history to fit a leftist narrative rather than present an objective portrayal of events. If Zinn’s biased narrative was accompanied by an incredibly talented teacher determined to fight dogmatic thinking, it wouldn’t be cause for concern; however, given the average quality of high school teachers in America, it’s risky to give students their first introduction to US history from a textbook well-known for sketchy methodology and poor intellectual rigor. Leaving aside textbooks, the ambiguity of rules on teacher impartiality and the human tendency to preach one’s own beliefs makes me inclined to think my teacher is not alone in committing some of the errors described above.
My time in an AP US History course convinced me that the use of biased textbooks, combined with left-leaning teachers who often can’t separate their teaching from their own beliefs, is dangerous to US history education. I’m reminded of Nietzsche’s famous words from “Beyond Good and Evil”:
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
In seeking to counter biased right-wing historical narratives, many left-leaning teachers and curriculum-makers have committed the same sin of polluting education with their own ideological leanings rather than promoting intellectual freedom and an objective treatment of history. The dogmatic thinking and poor teaching on both sides of the political spectrum must be acknowledged and rectified in order to redeem US history education and help develop a better society.