I’m a historian my training. I received my undergraduate degree in history, focusing on the history of the Cold War. I earned my master’s degree in history, focusing on U.S. colonial, Revolutionary, and Constitutional history.
Although I taught other history during my teaching years, my main classroom assignments revolved around U.S. History.
I can’t remember a time when parents or other community members questioned my interpretation of what should be taught in my classroom or how it should be taught to my young learners.
That was 40 years ago and it was a very different time than today. And that’s why I read with interest a recent posting by Yoni Applebaum, a staff writer for The Atlantic, who recently served as an advisor to an independent commission charged with contemplating the dismal state of American democracy while trying to arrive at a shared narrative describing what America really represented.
Applebaum gave his answer to their narrative question:
“’Patriotism,’ I volunteered.”
“I had rolled a live grenade into the center of the room. One participant flinched, as if struck. Suddenly, everyone was talking at once, voices and tempers rising. One woman said the word made her feel excluded. Another said it connoted violence and racism. Still another participant was offended that anyone could be offended by the word. The facilitator declined to write patriotism on the easel. As the quarreling continued, I sat back, stunned. All of the people in the room had come here for the specific purpose of finding a common narrative. What hope did that project have if they could not even agree – each in their own way – on loving the country they were trying to save?”
“Americans, of course, have never exactly agreed on why this country was founded or what it stands for. Fierce arguments over those questions have long divided families and roiled politics, and even once produced a bloody civil war. But throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th, a simplistic patriotic narrative prevailed. ‘Providence designed that on this continent should be seen an example of democratic government,’ a textbook explained to young students in 1872, ‘which means government ‘of the people, for the people, by the people.’”
“Americans defined their nation in this way, by their commitment to a common creed – of equality, rights, and opportunity – and to a corresponding set of democratic ideals that they were modeling for the world. In practice, they generally fell short of those principles, sometimes seeming to pursue their abnegation more than their fulfillment. But the white men who built their fledgling republic around an idea, instead of around a common ancestry, opened the possibility that any who subscribed to its creed could become a citizen. Over time, other Americans demanded that the nation live up to its ideals and recognize their equality. For more than two centuries, our creedal nationalism has been a source of strength, binding together Americans of diverse faiths and backgrounds.”
“But lately, we have discovered that it is also a vulnerability. A nation defined by blood and soil – built around a shared religion or ethnicity – can survive divergent narratives. To a country built on an idea, though, and bound together by a shared understanding of our history, the inability to tell a common story might well prove fatal.”
“In recent decades, the traditional American story has come under sustained attack from both flanks. On the left, scholars and activists suspicious of nationalism have pushed to redefine the United States as a country exceptional mostly for its flaws and crimes. On the right, politicians and commentators hostile to diversity have sought to gloss over those sins and, more recently, lay claim to the nation on behalf of ‘heritage Americans.’ Unable to agree on how to tell our story, we have swiftly abandoned efforts to tell it at all. The hours devoted to social studies in schools are shrinking, and survey courses in American history are vanishing from college campuses. The signature even of the nation’s 250th birthday might prove to be not a keynote speech or a patriotic pageant, but a no-holds-barred UFC fight on the South Lawn of the White House.”
“Most Americans are still proud of their country – although the percentage has been declining with each successive generation, and the decline is particularly steep among young progressives. If patriotism is going to be a word that can be used in polite company, then we will need to figure out how to tell the story of ourselves. Because without a coherent national story, we will fail to be a coherent nation.”
As a well-trained historian, I honestly do not know how you would teach a course in American history today. It seems like many of the truths I thought were relevant to teach my young learners while I was at the front of the class then seem questioned and criticized now – from both the left and the right. We desperately need a common story to tell our young learners, but our version of that common story has become filled with suspicion and ridicule. No wonder our young people aren’t interested in learning our country’s history. They don’t care because we can’t decide what stories can and will make them care.
If America continues to unravel, which is probably the one point both my liberal and conservative friends can agree on these days, then our problem about how to teach our history will stop being a problem to solve.
There just won’t be a history worth telling.
Til tomorrow. SVB
A Better Path to Learning 
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