By Stanley Kurtz
Thursday, September 24, 2020
Our schools have buried the glory and beauty of America’s
story under a mountain of misplaced guilt and tendentious ideology. Yes, there
are faults in our story — the stain of slavery above all. Yet the weight and
significance of our tale lay in the striving to overcome our failings. American
history is, in part, the chronicle of our attempts to more perfectly realize
the principles of liberty and equality that inspired our founding. There is a
way for America’s schools to grasp this truth and again impart an honest and
confident pride in our story. That path emerged last week when President Trump
spoke at the National Archives. Yet the full significance of the education
strategy laid out by the president has been missed.
President Trump’s remarks were delivered at the White
House Conference on American History. So far, news out of that event has
highlighted the president’s intention to appoint a 1776 Commission to forward
patriotic education in our nation’s schools. That is only a part of the
picture, however. The fuller story emerges when you attend to the conference
that preceded the president’s address, and to an important yet overlooked
moment in his remarks.
The White House Conference on American History helped to
introduce a new solution to the decline of history education in this country.
American Achievement Testing (AAT), a new non-profit company, has formed an
alliance with the historian Wilfred McClay, whose extraordinary new American
history textbook, Land
of Hope, is unlike any text currently available. In partnership with
the National Association of Scholars (NAS), AAT recently received a grant from
the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), to design instructional
materials for K–12 U.S. history courses, with Land of Hope as their core
text. Theodor Rebarber, CEO of AAT, Wilfred McClay, author of Land of Hope,
and Peter Wood, president of NAS, all spoke at the White House Conference on
American history, as did Jordan Adams, who supervises history instruction at
the system of charter schools associated with Hillsdale College, where Land
of Hope is used as a text. (Other presentations less directly related to
AAT’s project are well worth watching.) President Trump touted the NEH grant
during his speech and asked Rebarber, McClay, and Wood to stand and be
recognized. (You can see a video of the conference, with talks by Wood, McClay,
Rebarber, Adams, and others here, and video of the
president’s remarks here.)
AAT’s U.S. history course materials — and the way they will be adopted — hold
the key to the president’s new education reform plans.
AAT’s strategy for reforming American history education —
and eventually other subjects — represents a sharp break with the failed
approach of the national education reform movement supported for years by the
conservative education establishment. Instead of attempting to impose a de
facto national curriculum (think Common Core, the College Board’s AP U.S.
history framework, and plans for new national civics standards), AAT hopes to
return our education system to the principles of federalism, competition, and
local control. Before unpacking AAT’s reform strategy and explaining why it
represents a better way than the quest for de facto national standards, let’s
have a look at the unique features of AAT’s approach to American history
instruction, beginning with Land of Hope.
Wilfred McClay’s Land of Hope is learned,
inspiring, and honest. That combination may strike a generation of skeptical
postmodernist historians and their progeny as implausible, but it’s not. The
conviction that our core national narrative is false, while only its cynical
debunking is true, is a prejudice like any other. To endure and flourish as a
constitutional republic — respecting the fundamental liberties of our citizens
and modeling all this for the world — is an accomplishment to be acknowledged
and explained, every bit as much as America’s periodic failings and strife.
McClay’s textbook does justice to all sides of the ledger, in a way that both
informs and inspires.
Consider America’s founding. The 1619 Project casts the
idea that America was founded on the principles of the founding documents as a
lie. It claims instead that America’s true meaning is to be found in the
commencement of slavery in 1619. (1619 Project leader Nikole Hannah-Jones now falsely
denies that she ever made this claim.)
Seemingly more mainstream textbooks are hardly better.
Take America’s
History, by James Henretta, Eric Hinderaker, Rebecca Edwards, and Robert O.
Self, one of the first textbooks conformed to the College Board’s controversial
2014 AP US History (APUSH) framework. Henretta made his scholarly reputation
interpreting the new Marxist social history to Americans. His textbook reflects
that bias. Henretta treats America’s founding as a product of class conflict.
But for a passing quote from Benjamin Franklin, there is little in this text
that describes our republic’s strengths or explains its longevity. Bereft of
inspiration, Henretta offers a spare, cold, reductive, and implicitly debunking
take on America’s founding moment. Yet this text has been held up as a model by
the College Board.
With Wilfred McClay’s treatment of America’s founding in Land
of Hope, we are in entirely new territory. McClay is no Pollyanna. He
includes the very same class conflicts cited by Henretta. Yet Land of Hope
does more. McClay explores the understanding of human nature that stood behind
the Framers’ Constitution, the artful balance they struck between competing
institutional imperatives, and the strengths and weaknesses of personal
character in figures such as Madison and Washington. Without boasting or
untoward pride, the Founding emerges in McClay’s telling as a genuine
achievement hammered out under challenging circumstances by remarkable human
beings. This story evokes an unforced sense of appreciation in the reader.
Contrast this reaction with the conviction engendered by Henretta that
America’s founding — indeed history itself — is little more than a shadow play
manipulated by competing class interests.
Without boasting or crudity, but simply by laying out the
magnitude of the challenge and what it took in intellectual, political, and
human terms to meet it, McClay evokes pride in our founding. Yet he does not
stop there. After tackling the formation of our constitutional republic, McClay
segues into a lengthy reflection on slavery and the failure of the Framers to
satisfactorily address it. Here McClay acknowledges and explores the failings
of the Framers, yet also frankly considers the factors that stayed their hand on
the slavery issue — the near impossibility of abolishing slavery and creating a
union of the states at one and the same time, for example. Here also are
arresting reflections on the nature of moral progress, the place of slavery in
world history, and the imperfections to be expected in even our noblest heroes.
McClay makes a powerful case against the claim that America was founded on
slavery (the central allegation of the 1619 Project). Yet he leaves the final
moral balance sheet to be tallied by his now far more fully informed and
thoughtful readers.
McClay’s presentation of America’s founding in Land of
Hope is a tour de force. I wish every American could read it. I have no
doubt that if Americans were able to take in the treatment of our founding in
Henretta’s all-too-typical AP U.S. History textbook side by side with Land
of Hope, the overwhelming majority of parents — regardless of political
party — would prefer their children to learn from McClay.
By itself, the opportunity to have McClay’s Land of Hope
as a textbook would be more than enough to justify adoption of an American
history curriculum devised by AAT. Over and above this, however, AAT is
breaking new ground. Most American history courses feature resource-books
containing original historical documents, important presidential speeches, and
such. The College Board, however, does not make such documents central to its
exam. AAT, in contrast, will develop a list of quasi-canonical historical
documents: e.g. Washington’s Farewell Address, a Roosevelt speech on the New
Deal, a Reagan speech on the dangers of big government, etc. These documents
will be every bit as central to AAT’s exams as McClay’s textbook and AAT’s
other instructional materials. This, in turn, will build up a common fund of
reference points for our national debates.
That doesn’t mean AAT will ignore America’s social or
economic history. AAT will supplement Land of Hope’s coverage of those
issues in its broader curriculum — including, for example, material on the
environmental movement, the labor movement, traditional religious movements,
the economic institutions and developments that led to America’s increasing
affluence, and other movements as well. AAT’s approach to these social and
economic developments will be substantially more balanced than we find in most
textbooks and curricula, however. For example, the sense of crisis conveyed by
early environmentalists such as Rachel Carson or Paul Ehrlich will be attended
to, but so will the perspective of those who rely on more limited regulation
and the flexibility and innovation of our free enterprise system to grapple
with environmental challenges. In short, AAT will represent a fuller spectrum
of American thinking on our most highly debated cultural issues.
Working closely with McClay, other scholar-advisers, and
outstanding teachers, AAT will develop a wide range of additional classroom
materials to fill out a coherent American history curriculum — including lesson
plans, teacher presentation materials, student assignments, and assessments.
The result will be a genuine alternative to the now dominant mode: reductive
and divisive histories that slight our common American story for identity-group
grievance or simplistic, debunking ideology.
Far from imposing AAT’s American history curriculum on
the country, the NEH has simply provided a modest grant to begin the creation
of a curriculum that will restore genuine choice to states, school districts,
teachers, and parents. The College Board’s appalling
AP U.S. History curriculum
now dominates nationally, and the College Board itself functions as something
of an unelected
national school board. Over the
long-term AAT hopes to break the College Board’s AP monopoly not with federal
coercion, but with a simply superior product. That means more choice, not less.
Initially, however, AAT will offer a true alternative to current non-AP U.S.
history curricula and the monochromatic character of American history
textbooks, nearly all of which share the same limitations and biases.
The conservative education establishment has long
partnered with left-leaning educators in an attempt to craft national standards
(e.g., the disastrous
Common Core in reading and math). This establishment now hopes to extend
the quest for national standards to a civics curriculum. Yet beginning with the
ill-fated development of national history standards in the mid-1990s, the same
problems emerge. The dominant education left co-opts any move to have
government centrally plan curriculum and testing and infuses it with bias. The
cultural wreckage wrought by the conservative education establishment’s failed
strategy is glaring and undeniable. Why make the same mistake again?
It’s true that fledgling efforts such as AAT may
initially grow slowly, with only a few states and school districts at first,
and are sure to face funding challenges as well. With a genuine alternative now
under development, however, I believe the majority in this country that still
wants America’s history to be properly taught will be galvanized to embrace and
support AAT. (I can’t pretend to be neutral in this fight. I invited AAT to
form and continue to advise it informally, although I do not and will not take
money from AAT.)
Even as the first handful of states or school districts
adopt AAT’s U.S. history curriculum, the competitive pressure put on the
College Board and textbook publishers will do more to move history education
back to the center than any number of conservative education policy wonks
sitting around the table, hat in hand, begging for crumbs from their dominant
left-leaning counterparts.
AAT’s efforts have only just begun. The modest grant the
company has received from the NEH is only enough to begin work on the initial
units of a curriculum. Public support — cultural, political, and financial —
for AAT’s efforts will determine whether the enterprise will ultimately succeed
or fail. You can learn more about AAT’s history project at its website here.
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