America’s “distinctive problem,” according to longtime University of Chicago political scientist Herbert Storing, is “a loss of confidence in the legitimacy and necessity of providing educational support for the political and moral principles on which the country is based.” This is particularly showcased, he noted, in the field of the social sciences — that broad area encompassing the study of US history, politics and government, and geography — where all the energy appears to concentrate on debunking the “myths” and reversing the “indoctrination” about America’s greatest statesmen-citizens and unique governing principles.
Professor Storing made those observations in 1975, but his words speak to the crises facing American schools and American society in 2015, particularly as they relate to the study of US history and the purposes of constitutional government. At the forefront of this summer’s debate is the College Board’s revised AP History framework, which proponents argue enables teachers and students to explore in depth the main events and documents of US history, unfettered by “just a single theme of identity politics or cultural history,” but which opponents charge shows instead a heavy-handed focus on a narrative of successive American depravity and injustice.
A daily-growing list of prominent historians, professors of politics, law, and history, and other public intellectuals, among whom are several AEI scholars and friends, have signed a “Letter Opposing the 2014 APUSH Framework” published in early June of this year. Their voiced concern is that the framework’s emphasis skews the historical record, and shuts out the desire or the possibility of fostering among students an informed attachment to the United States.
But to see this debate as merely conservatives or liberals cynically playing politics with history is to ignore a problem that has been entrenching itself since at least the 1970s. At the educational level, civics or social studies teachers — by their own admission — have been “uncertain about what the precise content of a proper civic education should be”; they also give the lowest priority to teaching key facts, dates, and major events, because such things are seen as dull and boring, without the power to compel students’ curiosity or imagination. Yet the majority of these teachers also still hope to instill in their students a respect for the nation grounded on a clear-eyed awareness of its shortcomings as well as its triumphs, as the survey “High Schools, Civics, and Citizenship: What Social Studies Teachers Think and Do” – published by AEI’s Program on American Citizenship – found in 2010.
Backlit by teachers’ own lack of agreement about the content of proper civics, the AP History debate throws in sharp relief what historian Wilfred McClay describes in a new essay as “History in the Age of Fracture.” In the atmosphere where “all narratives are contested and the various disciplines no longer take a broad view of the human condition…and have abandoned the search for common ground in favor of focusing on the concerns and perspectives of ever-more-minute subdisciplines and…exclusive categories of experience,” the very concept and practice of history, and any sense of “civilizational unity,” grows further from reach.
History, writes McClay, is civilizational memory. It’s a way of seeing, understanding, and rendering the world as well as other forms of knowledge. Without it, “or the stories memories are suspended in, we cannot say who we are or what we are…we cannot…even dwell in society.” But to make sense of all the purportedly dry and boring facts and dates that relate who and what we are, we need some organizational narrative, a structure within which “facts arrange themselves and thereby take on significance.”
That unifying narrative for Americans is readily available through the lives of its most prominent public citizens — its statesmen, the greatest of whom serve as models of how we should understand our governing principles and our constitution through the crises they faced. This isn’t blind hero-worship, as the accusation goes.
A primary problem of education, as noted by McClay (and Storing), is to inculcate healthy civic values in a way that does not foreclose, but that encourages a questioning and thereby a deepened understanding of our governing values. It is precisely this understanding of statesmanship’s formative impact on our civic understanding of ourselves that is the impulse behind the Program on American Citizenship’s recently released e-curriculum on “Abraham Lincoln and the Constitution.”
The study of our statesmen, properly conducted, is a far cry from indoctrination or myth-perpetuation. It makes good citizens at the same time that it extends their horizons. This is a liberalizing education, worthy of a self-governing citizenry.
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