David Blight Responds to the Attack on the Teaching of History

David Blight, one of America’s foremost historians and the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Frederick Douglass, has an article in The Atlantic responding to the coordinated political attack on the teaching of history at the high school and middle school levels. The whole article deserves to be read, but I will except those section detailing efforts by university historians to work with history teachers. David Blight writes:

For nearly three decades, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History (GLI), and many other institutions, foundations, and agencies, including the federal Education Department, have sponsored summer seminars that bring secondary- and middle-school history instructors to university campuses, where they are treated as professionals and intellectuals. They discover the mysteries and joys of archives and original documents, and they learn through the best scholarship from the people who wrote it. They take seminars about presidential history, the American Revolution, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, westward expansion, Native American culture and dispossession, gender and women’s history, the civil-rights movement, immigration, urban history, industrialization, constitutional history, and yes, slavery, abolition, and racism as central threads in the American experience.

If Republican politicians and the parents they have disingenuously inflamed need a target for their fears, let them blame the American historians, like me, who spend months of their lives helping teachers build better bases of knowledge about real history. The finest historians of the late 20th and early 21st centuries—far too many to name—have been teaching teachers in classrooms and on field trips bursting with knowledge, sizzling conversations, astonishing documents, and most of all, a hard-earned, even joyous mutual trust.

So let the Republicans blame us. Bring it on. The American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians have signed on to a coalition of more than 25 such groups called Learn From History, which seeks to combat deliberate misinformation about the current state of history education. This is one history war we have to win.

GLI reports that since 1995, approximately 28,000 teachers have participated in its summer seminars (I’ve taught at least one seminar through this program each summer for more than two decades), as well as in online courses and public lectures. Its website has become an alternative Google for history teachers. The numbers may be even larger for the NEH. Teachers with a passion to improve their game embrace these experiences, learning an inspiring, pluralistic American history; parents and politicians would do well to observe. Come listen to teachers debate the books they read, and wrestle with how to create pedagogical stories about both the darkest and the most uplifting history. Listen to them figure out the balance in their own classrooms between the heroic and the tragic, between war and peace, as they wrestle with how to teach about the changing character of racism, and about the forces of change in history that humans can only hope to withstand, if never control. Come feel their intensity, see them move in and out of the irony of human folly and aspiration, as they confront their own assumptions and beliefs.

Parents and Republican politicians should come listen to serious teachers grapple with the question: What is this thing called “history?” History is not a fable told to make us feel good or bad, not a plaything or a pageant of progress toward some goal of equipoise above the human condition. We are always and everywhere in the middle of history; we cannot escape it. In 1935, W. E. B. Du Bois made a compelling appeal while writing about Reconstruction: “Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all of this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?”

Some of the most hopeful moments of my teaching life have come in working with secondary teachers. We are not on the clock, and everyone has temporarily escaped their normal lives to simply learn together in a rare kind of teacherly communion. I was once, after all, one of them. I spent the first seven years of my career as a high-school history teacher in my hometown of Flint, Michigan, in the 1970s. I still maintain that in those years I did the most important teaching of my life. My students were Black, white, and Hispanic, mostly stable working class, and no one left guilty because they were learning about slavery for the first time. My fellow teachers and I blundered our way through curricular revolutions; we were committed simply to offering our students ways to forge a sense of history, of why the past matters, how it has shaped us, whatever the subject. No one owns history, but we are all responsible for it, bound by our humanity to know as much of it as we can.

 

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