No Blinders on US History Curriculum

US history or US histories, that is the question.  Is my story your story?  Is there a single story?  Can there be multiple stories woven into a broader telling of a national history?  What role do blinders play in our history?  What should we teach our children?  Who says?

What do we know about US history?

The course title reads United States History.   I taught this course and supervised its instruction.  Our classic US History textbooks told our national story beginning with European exploration and colonization, revolution and establishment of a constitutional republic, westward expansion, civil war, industrialization, world wars, civil rights, and, depending on publication date, some contemporary stories.  All supplemental materials used to teach our history to children supported this chronicle of our American pride and spirit.  US history was Eurocentric and comfortably fit the concepts of our 20th century nationalism. 

We taught and students learned what Winston Churchill meant when he said, “History is written by the victors”.  Our history curriculum in school has been the story of how English-speaking people spread across the middle of North America and established a government, economic system, and society to sustain the victor’s heritage.  The victors place the blinders.

https://slate.com/culture/2019/11/history-is-written-by-the-victors-quote-origin.html

My family lineage parallels traditional US history.  We immigrated from Holland, intermarried with English colonists and fought in the Revolutionary War.  As the settled frontier moved west, so did we.  In 1849 a great-grandfather joined the California Gold Rush and returned to Wisconsin with enough riches to buy land and establish a growing family on multiple farms.  By 1900 we were college-educated and mobile.  We worked in FDR’s federal agriculture department and fought in WW2.  We thrived as the Silent and Greatest Generations and Baby-Boomers.  We are middle-class America personified and we find our story told and explained in a US History text.

But our story does not mirror that of almost 50% of Americans today.  Many of the children I taught and learned from cannot find their family story in a US History text.  “I do not see myself or my family represented in US History” is a complaint that educators knew existed for decades and only recently have begun to address.  After all, we say to children, “This is the history of our country”, the first thing children do is to look for faces, names, and stories that are like their own.  As soon as we ask children to find themselves in our national history we recognize multiple stories within our history.

As examples, our history text tells that enslaved African labor created the southern plantation culture and economy.  The Civil War was fought to free the slaves and resulted in amendments to the Constitution.  Reconstruction brought Jim Crow laws and segregation in the south.  Martin Luther King led the civil rights movement and was assassinated.  Jackie Robinson was the first Black player in Major League Baseball and Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods each transformed their respective sports.  And Barack Obama was our first Black President.

For a century the only mention of American Indians in our texts was Pocahontas, Squanto, Sacajawea, and Sitting Bull.  Pocahontas saved John Smith and married and introduced tobacco to London.  Squanto taught the Pilgrims to use fish as fertilizer and sat at the first Thanksgiving.  Sacajawea guided Lewis and Clarke’s expedition over the Rocky Mountains.  Sitting Bull led the Sioux in the Battle of Little Big Horn and the death of Custer. 

The story of Hispanic people in the text is one of losses.  The Alamo and Mexican War of 1846-48 led to the annexation of Texas and all the territory between the Louisiana Purchase and the Pacific.  (A student needed to visualize the states formed by the Purchase to understand this.)  Simon Bolivar was the George Washington of South America.

Asians get equal short shrift.  Chinese workers built the Central Pacific railroad from California to Promontory Point, Utah, to join with the Union Pacific and form our first transcontinental railroad.  And Japanese Americans were interred during WW2. 

A traditional US History text fit the political-cultural realities of our pre-civil rights eras.  That text conformed to the victors theory.  Times changed.  This is a woke story but a reality story.  The Declaration of Independence acknowledged certain unalienable rights held by all (men according to the Founding Fathers).  Stories of how Americans came to share their rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness cannot be blindered in their telling.

Historical versions

If you don’t like what is showing on your media screen, change providers.  If it is television, change channels.  If it is a history text, change texts.  Even among the victors there are different tellings of the same stories.  Depending on your state, the adopted US History text is selected according to the telling that appeals to state legislators who make the ultimate decisions regarding school text adoptions.  In the textbook market, California and Texas spend the most money on state adoptions.  US History in these two states reflects how they want US History to be taught to their school children.  These are state-approved blinders, and they contradict the rights of all Americans to understand their stories.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/01/12/us/texas-vs-california-history-textbooks.html

How does the story of our history fit our nation today?

We are no longer white/European.  Our population mass is shifting from white/non-Hispanic to a reflection of the melting pot our nation was destined to become.  So says the plaque at the foot of the Statue of Liberty written by Emma Lazarus, daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants.

“As of 2019, the current distribution of the U.S. population by race and ethnicity is:

  • White/non-Hispanic: 60.1%
  • Hispanic: 18.5%
  • Black: 12.2%
  • Asian: 5.6%
  • Multiple Races: 2.8%
  • American Indian/Alaska Native: .7%
  • Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander: .2%”
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-u-s-population-by-race/

Within the next decade White/non-Hispanic people will no longer be the majority race/ethnicity.  The aggregated majority will be people of color.

More importantly, all in our census are citizens of the United States.  In the collective, we are Americans.  This is true of the census of our people but not of the US History of our people.  Our history curriculum does not tell the stories of our American people.

Cognitive Dissonance

What do we do when we know disparate things to be true?  Psychologists call this cognitive dissonance.  We experience discomfort and angst when confronted with dissonance.  In this case, our textual history does not accurately reflect our real histories or our histories does not tell the story we want to be told.

https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-cognitive-dissonance-2795012

Dissonance can cause us to

  • learn more about conflicting ideas in order to resolve a best understanding.
  • affirm our version of a story and attack anyone who holds a conflicting version.
  • create new versions that further strengthen our ideas and attack any other version.

And this is where we are today.  These three actions are taking place in and around our classrooms as adherents deal with their own and our societal dissonance. 

Some use the attack strategy claiming that any story other than the mainstreamed story written by the victors is unAmerican.  They make the issue partisan and divisive.  Texts and materials that do not support the victor story are suppressed and removed from school.  Blinders abound.

Some use the revision and new version strategies.  They cite the Founding Fathers wanting decisions today to be based on the ideas and constraints of the 1700s.  The Fathers truly were a narrow slice of the census of their time – wealthy, landed, Christian, white, and male.  Or they rewrite history to give the victors a moralistic superiority over the vanquished.  Our history is a natural selection and progression process.  More blinders.

And some understood one of the concepts they were taught in their school’s US History class.  The United States is a melting pot of peoples.  There is no dominant story to support one group of citizens over the interests of others.  To be understood and celebrated, the good, bad, and the ugly, history cannot have blinders.

The Big Duh!

The motto of the United States has been and is today e pluribus unum.  It is Latin meaning “out of many, one”.  US History taught to children today needs to be the truthful telling of the many stories that represent all the people who make up our one nation.  The melting pot is only getting larger and more complex.  Any child who does not hear and learn from the many stories is condemned to a severe dissonance problem.  A nation that does not learn from its history is condemned to repeat it.  We are smarter than that.

The Hard Work Is The Right Work

Being responsible for the education of children is not easy.  The speed, complexity, and complications of 21st century life is making this responsibility more and more difficult as every day we hear of a school controversy and crisis somewhere.  A board meeting in Timbuktu easily becomes headlines on national nightly news given how a social media post can explode sensationally.  And what is done in Timbuktu becomes a burning issue at a local meeting where most people cannot spell Timbuktu.  Being responsible requires leaders to understand the essential issues of their place and time, to sort the here and now from the Timbuktu, and not be afraid to tackle the hard stuff – the right work – of educating children.

Why is this thus?

There are several givens whenever we gather to talk about our local schools.  Our Constitution ensures our right to speak freely.  Wisconsin’s Open Meetings Laws ensure that school board meetings are open to public attendance with an opportunity for the public to speak to the school board.  And because almost everyone in the community attended a school of some sort, many people speak to their school board with the expertise of their personal school experience.  In summary, we are free to express our opinions about school and the school board is obligated to listen.  These are good things.

From the moment we labeled it public education, people felt compelled to express their opinion about how children should be educated.  Any adult who has or can biologically create a child feels authorized to explain how children should be raised and educated.  Today they express themselves standing at the lectern in front of the school board and from the screens of their computers, IPads, and smartphones while sitting at home.  This guaranteed exchange of “you speak, and we listen” is now part of posted school board agendas.  This is a healthy thing.

All board agenda items are not of the same importance.  The annual and daily operations of a district school require boards to consider, discuss, and approve items of routine business investigated and proposed by administrators.  These are the usual business of the board that once approved in the committee process need only a cursory airing in public and a vote.  It is true to say that many boards of education live on a steady diet of usual business agenda and shy away from controversy.  That said, the usual business is easy stuff and the controversial is the hard.  The hard points a board to the right work it must do.

Lastly, there is nothing inherently wrong with controversy; controversy being a voicing of oppositional points of view.  Good leadership understands that important educational issues will raise differing points of view and it is the work of the board to resolve conflicting points of view for the prosperity of the schools.  Best leadership does not shy away from controversy but tackles it honestly.

What should we know about this thusness?

Controversies abound!

The pandemic gave most school boards a rude awakening to the hard stuff.  As experienced ad nauseam, no school boards were educated or trained to deal with either pandemic education or the controversies of how schools should behave during a pandemic.  Few boards, if any, escaped this public crisis and the argument of battling points of view.   In fact, seated board members resigned, did not run for re-election, and were recalled by their electorate because of pandemic controversies.  The board table was not for the faint of heart when spittle and spite flew from impassioned parents and residents who knew best about public health and public education in an emergency.

Concurrent to the pandemic, other controversies brewed and erupted in school board rooms.  Events of police violence went national.  BLK begat an introspection of systemic racism that begat renewed white nationalism that begat a legislative rewriting of US history that could not be taught in public schools.  Speakers, despite historical fact, are making CRT their argument and the board room their arena.

Quietly then loudly gender identity and the evolving status of children claiming non-conforming gender expression forced the public, like tug-of-rope teams, to dig in their heels regarding who can use which bathrooms and locker rooms in schools.  Parents care more about this issue than their children.  The parent who cries “Protect my daughter!”, claims the media headline while distorting issues of discrimination and fairness. 

There are quiet controversies afoot.  As federal pandemic relief monies expire, school districts everywhere face financial crisis.  Usual school funding is not adequate to sustain the technologies and school staffing wrought by the pandemic.  While inflation diminishes family spending, school boards are proposing increases in local school taxes.  The controversies of cuts to school programs and school closing will clog the school board agenda for years to come.

A second quiet controversy is teacher shortage.  Teacher preparation programs in colleges and universities are dying for lack of enrollment.  As baby boomer teachers retire school boards are hard put to find qualified replacement teachers.  The controversy is this – state legislation is lowering the standards for a teaching license, persons who are not fully prepared to teach children to high standards of learning are being hired to assure a teacher in every classroom, student academic achievement is diving, and someone is to blame.  Hello, school board member!

What is a board to do?

Do these three things to succeed.

  • Grab each controversy by both ears, look it in the face, and deal with it.  Ignoring a controversy builds anger in the partisans and they will damn you for your lack of action.  Pussyfooting around a controversy allows it to grow constituent bases who demand action.  If you cannot provide the action, constituents will find someone who can.  Deal with it!
  • Know that school governance is not a democracy; it is representative government and only board members vote on school decisions.  As provided in law, the public has the right to speak with the school board and the board is obligated to listen.  Do not take anything said personally, even from the most spittle mouthed.  Do not take anything said as expert opinion or fact.  At the end of the meeting everyone else goes home and only board members vote on how the district will respond to a controversy.  Discuss and decide; that is what school boards do.
  • The board speaks for the education of all children in the district not for the happiness of parents, residents, and dissidents.  Self-interest, though denied, is the primary motive of every person who addresses the board – this is fact.  A board member’s only self-interest is the best education for ALL children, with ALL in capital letters.  A parent speaks for her child and her child’s peers.  A teacher for her grade level or those in her class.  A coach for her team.  The business manager for the budget.  Board members must consider ALL children, not just some, while ensuring that each child is provided an equal and equitable education and school experience.  This is the rub.  How to advance the cause of all while protecting the rights of the one.

Being responsible for the education of children is not easy.  If it were, anyone could do it and we don’t want just anyone to be responsible for the education of ALL children.  We want board members who can look inside the issues they confront to find humane, high ground, child-centered resolutions for tough questions.  I would like to think that if one of the two women claiming the child in the Bible’s Solomon “the wise” story had not said to spare the child and thus created a true claim as mother, Solomon would not have cleaved the child in two but adopted it as his own.  Board members consider ALL children your own and be willing take the forsaken child to your home.  This is your school board standard.

If you want parrots, teach birds not children

Talking about education cannot withstand a vacuum.  Just when the reading wars are subsiding, and masks have come off other versions of passion-based arguing rise to poke public education.  Peruse any recent educational journal, education reporter in your local newspaper, and be prepared for oppositional values wars (oppositional meaning my side v. your side, not just red or blue).

And hypocrisy knows no bounds.  The banners read “Educate, Don’t Indoctrinate”.  If the subliminal message is “Indoctrinate with my doctrine only”, are we having a discussion or a demand?

What do we know?

We were forewarned.  The first warning long ago was “all politics are local”.  Regarding education, partisan value issues have a difficult path at the national level.  Congress has little to do with schooling.  It is not easier at the state level; fifty states and cats are hard to corral.  Efforts at the statehouse level face tough sledding unless the governor, house/assembly, and senate are on the same page on the same day.  If they are, all that follows is a one-sided story.  Grass roots politics are at the county, city, town, township, and village levels and this is where the real arguments about education are being waged.

The second warning was “local schools and local rules” mean “who controls school board elections controls local schools”.  School board membership has become the logical and easy target for any faction of a community active and driven enough to change local schools into their own image.  Split the ballot with enough candidates, narrow the field with a primary, and run for the board in a spring election on a non-Presidential election year.  The spring election is the ballot that traditionally brings out the fewest voters.  And, voila!  A person or persons representing a small fraction/faction with a particular agenda can be school board members.  Swinging several seats and a new majority of a usual seven-member board can control local schools through local rules.  Easy peasy!

What do we know about school governance?

There are 421 school districts in Wisconsin, each with its statutory school board.  By statute, members are agents of the state responsible for local school governance including adherence with state rules and policies.  Board membership involves attendance at the board’s regular business, committee, and special meetings.  The Milwaukee Public Schools Board is an outlier with member salaries of $36,000+ and the meeting demands of a large, complex, urban district.  Board work is a business in our largest district and a small, part-time job in most WI districts.  Typical board members in the hundreds of small districts receive an honorarium of $2-3,000 and meeting obligations require less than 10 hours per month.

School board members typically are not prepared for the vitriol of agenda-based arguments or attacks.  Most members rise from the traditional school booster groups of parents committed to educational programs for their children and their children’s peer group.  Their usual challenges are how to sustain current programs with reduced state financial aid, whether to buy a new school bus this year or next, and what is an optimal class size in their schools.  These are significant yet not “attack dog” issues.  When the dogs are out, many boards either close up shop or cave in.

What must we remember?

At the heart of most, if not every school board discussion and decision, should be children.  “How will this enhance the education of children?”, should be our constant mantra.  Played large, this mantra informs everything from reading programs to school remodeling to employee salaries to football uniforms.  Simply put, schooling is about children not adults.

This blog is not used to promote any point of view or specific, contemporary agenda.  Rather, the blog advocates for best practices for causing all children to learn.

What do we know about educating children?

Personal inquisitiveness is a foundation for lifelong learning.  The first word, personal, is essential.  Most of us want to learn to know, not be told how or what to know.  The intrinsic motivation of personalized learning is a powerful force for exciting children to learn and helping them persist in learning.  Somethings children learn have a social context and they must engage in learning with other children.  Yet, when a child feels a personalized engagement with what is being learned, a child is more likely to learn and remember.

Inquisitive is the operant word in personalized education.  To inquire is to ask a question.  It says, “I want to know about this”.  Its synonyms are equally powerful.  To explore.  To investigate.  To examine.  To analyze.  To inquire opens the door for learning with a question leading to all sorts of new information and experiences.  To inquire retains a personal control of the learning as what unfolds may not be of interest or significance.  To inquire about something opens the door to ask about something else.  Life is full of inquiry.  We want children to be inquisitive.  When we start with this purpose, untold possibilities for significant learning emerge.  Without inquisitiveness, we are training puppets of our thinking.

The ability to inquire should be a bedrock in child education.  We know –

  • Inquisitiveness is innate.  The interest to know, if not the need to know, is within every child. 
  • Inquisitiveness is to wonder and “I wonder …” is the beginning of an adventure.
  • Inquisitiveness is unbiased.  A child learns the winds that will fill their personal sails and there are many winds.
  • Inquisitiveness leads to exploration and invention and creation.  Our world needs exploring, inventive, and creative people.
  • Inquisitiveness allows individuals to grow and develop and to share.  “I wonder…” initiates learning that frequently results in “Hey, did you know …”.  Then, our children begin to educate others.

We learn more about inquisitiveness by addressing what it is not.  To not want a child to be inquisitive is to insist she –

  • Accept what she is told without question.
  • Ignores options and possibilities.
  • Considers all things she is told as facts whether true of not.
  • Abandons the joy of being surprised.

What do we want for our children?

“I want our children to be wiser and braver than me and prepared to meet the unknowns they will encounter.” 

This is both a personal statement and one that I hear from many of my generation.  We Baby Boomers had our whack at the world.  In hindsight and with the judgments of successor generations, Boomers had some significant successes and left some very significant messes.  After studying, I found the same to be true of predecessor generations. 

I am proud of our local schools where inquiry and exploration are prized and supported.  Our purpose is to provide all children with opportunities for learning.  We would rather our children are reading and learning broadly so that when asked “What do you think about…?”, or “Show us what you have learned?”, they will give informed and insightful responses and performances and not parrot back limited incantations of what they were told.  Their 21st century requires no less.

Children are great people, and we assist them to be great adults through the type of education we provide in their formative years.  I tell all but my bachelor bird loving friends, if you want parrots, raise birds.  I tell my school board colleagues, if you want a braver and wiser next generation, don’t educate them like parrots.  And resist anyone who wants to make a classroom into a parrot factory.

Unheralded Educators

A friend of mine drove a local school bus.  Driving was a second or third job for him as the two hour early morning and mid- to late afternoon runs created time for mid-day and evening work.  Driving, however, is what drove him.

“Never had a ticket.  Never had an accident.  Never had a lost child.  Never got lost myself”, he would humbly say about his time in the driver’s seat.  At Halloween and Christmas he put masks on the front of his yellow bus.  He had a perpetual gleam in eyes even when he needed to look up into the large rear view mirror to tell a young boy, “Sit down, Mark”.  I don’t believe he ever turned in a discipline referral to the school principals, because he talked with the children on their bus, not his bus. 

Every fall there would be a moment resembling Forrest Gump’s first greeting with his school bus driver.  Forrest introduced himself and she introduced herself and they began a morning and afternoon routine that lasted for years.  Some years there were as few as thirty-some children on his bus, but most years there were 40-plus riders.  He knew of them before their first day on a school bus and he knew about them years after they graduated.  He knew their parents and their parents knew him on a first name basis.  He never left a dropped off young child until he saw a wave from a parent at the door or in a waiting car.  He was a parent in absentia for dozens of children twice each school day.

Like all veteran school bus drivers, he had his share of criers and pukers, kids whose forgotten lunch on the morning bus he delivered to the school offices, and kids who stood at their morning stop without a hat or mittens/gloves.  He carried a box of spares.

One of the most meaningful moments of every school year occurred in the first week of June.  On the last days of the school year, he would say with what some might call teary eyes, “I remember when she started Kindergarten.  They are all so small and she was a brave one.  She rode every day; seldom got a ride to school, until she got her driver’s license.  For the last year or so, she drove to school with friends.  I watched her grow up from a five year old to a fine young woman.  This week, she rode every day and today she brought me a ‘Thank you’ card of being her driver and friend.  She’s one of mine.”

He and our team of school bus drivers are unheralded educators of children.  We are a rural district where most children ride our yellow buses to school.  Let’s do the math.  With approximately 170 days of school each year and an average route time in our district of 25 minutes, bus riding children spend more than 140 hours each school year on a school bus.  That is equal to the amount of time a student spends in a secondary classroom for math or ELA or science.  If a child rides every day of their Kindergarten year through tenth grade, the year a child can get a driver’s license, a child really grows up on a school bus with more than 1,500 hours of riding time or had a class each day with the same teacher for 11 years. 

That is a lot of driver-rider contact time in which there is one driver and dozens of children on a school bus traveling back and forth between homes and school.  We trust children to the safe driving care of our drivers.  We trust their well-being and that a driver who knows them watches out over them every morning and every afternoon.  Across the decades, our driving unheralded educators deliver every day.

Your Personal Pantheon of Teachers

Miss Blaine knew.  She knew I liked stories and histories and language.  If I could read about it and begin to imagine it, I could know it and the more I read and imagined the more I wanted to learn.  And, she knew I was a quiet student seldom raising my hand but could give illustrated answers when called upon.  Miss Blaine knew me.  She was my teacher for two years – 4th and 5th grade, back-to-back with Miss Blaine – in the late 1950s.

Miss Blaine knew Carol and Richard and Mike W and Bruce.  They topped all the weekly charts for the 32 students in our classroom; those were early Boomer years when all classrooms were bulging.  Spelling, arithmetic quizzes, science check tests and annual ITBS assessments – these were our straight A’s champs week in and week out.   She fed them more assignments than the rest of us, and more comments on their projects, and more difficult books to read.  The more she gave, the better they did.  Miss Blaine knew Dick and Donnie and Steve Y struggled to read and do their math and she gave them more of her one-on-one time.  She knew when a child needed the boost of leading the class from her room to Miss Snyder’s art room, the little self-esteem boost of being picked by Miss Blaine to lead.

Miss Blaine knew how to hook each child in her classroom to cause each of us to learn.  She never looked at us sitting in our rows of desks with a solitary gaze but flitted her eyes from child to child as she spoke so that we knew she was talking to each of us intentionally.  She was short in stature and did not need to kneel or bend very far when she stood by my desk to comment on my work or ask a guiding question to keep me on track.  With eyes shut I can still summon her presence and my want to be a better student, to get more problems right on my nemesis math assignments, because she thought I could.

I would like to think that every student in every school experiences their own Miss Blaine.  Across the fourteen years of 4K-12 education, a random draw of Miss Blaine’s in elementary, middle, and high school, in grade level classes and in subject classes, is enough to make school and learning meaningful.  It is enough hooking by master teachers to keep children self-invested in their learning.

Consider your own history as a student.  Can you name your Miss Blaines?  Can you remember how specific teachers made a difference in your school life?  In your heart of hearts you know them as they knew you.

Miss Blaine, Mrs. Wendlent, Mr. Marshall, Mrs. McArthur, Mr. Cummings, Mr. Chute, Mr. Mixdorf, Mr. Hubacek – I am eternally grateful that you taught me. 

My listing these names does not mean I did not learn from each of the 80+ teachers who were mine in my kindergarten through senior year experience.  I indeed learned from all.  But, there really is a difference in a child’s connections with their teachers.  Some connections are as routine and pedestrian as the spending of common time and the management of 180 days’ of school work.  Other connections mark you for your lifetime.

My Miss Blaine is long gone, as are almost all my teachers.  So are many of my classmates.  We know that the effects of a person’s lifetime are short-lived, but while we live and remember the effects of the teachers who knew us and hooked us as learning children, the glory of their good teaching prevails.