If we want to raise kids to become civic-minded adults who understand the context of current events and take the necessary action in relation to them, we need to be teaching our country’s full history—including the regressions, brutality, and ongoing injustices.
In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, a wave of campaigns led by young students, alumni and parents have been pushing local schools to build a more diverse education that every student can see themselves in.
Of course, not everyone agrees on exactly what kind of history should be taught. Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, recently introduced the Saving American History Act of 2020 bill, which would deny federal funding to schools that borrow material from The New York Times Magazine’s The 1619 Project.
President Donald Trump expressed a similar sentiment on September 17, when he called for “patriotic education” while threatening to cut funding from schools teaching The 1619 Project or any critical race theory. He went on to say that it was imperative for national unity to have a shared identity as Americans, suggesting that the 1776 Unites Curriculum, a project promoted by the right to combat “victimhood culture,” be taught instead.
As the fight over our history continues, many people have been rethinking the systems that guide our lives, including the way we teach our kids. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder by a white Minneapolis police officer on May 25, a wave of campaigns led by young students, alumni and parents have been pushing local schools to build a more diverse education that every student can see themselves in.
But, for an antiracist education to be effective, it can’t just be embedded in history, it must be embedded in all subjects. It must also include addressing disparities in the education system itself through taking steps like hiring more Black teachers and getting police officers out of public schools.
“If you can picture being inside a room, and the walls are all historically grounded in white supremacy or whiteness or Eurocentricity, it can feel like you’re suffocating,” Dr. Gholdy Muhammad, author of Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy, tells The Progressive. “Because the walls have historically not served any of us well—white, Black, all of us.”
Dr. Muhammad also described how an antiracist education can be introduced across different subjects, citing a middle school math lesson plan on calculating distances that incorporated the history of the Green Book, a travel guide that advised Black people on safe places to visit as they made their way throughout the United States.
“Students learned the history, travel joys and violence Black people faced when they traveled with their families and friends during the 1940s and 50s,” Muhammad said in an interview. “They ended the lesson by considering if we still need a Green Book today given the amount of violence still on Black lives.”
At present, there are no national education standards that determine how history is taught in classrooms across the United States. While there have been attempts to fashion a nationwide standard in the past—and there are a few currently in the works (like the educator-led project Educating for American Democracy)—creating a national curriculum for an antiracist historical education would help ensure that every state implements one.
Trinidad Gonzales, a historian at South Texas College, acknowledges the enormity of the challenge.
“Because our educational system is controlled by states, it is difficult to create a national standard that deals with the history of the idea of race and the belief system of racism,” he says in an interview. “However, the federal government can incentivize such teaching through providing grant money for the development of curriculum and teacher training to help incorporate such history into their classes.”
As Gonzales noted, it is up to each state to individually choose what aspects of U.S. history are taught and which textbooks are used by teachers. Typically, local school districts or a panel of representatives selected by state-level education department boards decide on these issues. And because of this, the end result can vary widely from state to state and is largely dependent on the political and professional makeup of the individuals chosen for each panel.
In California in 2016, for instance, a panel made up entirely of educators devised a 900-page rewrite of history textbooks that included the history of previously absent or minimally mentioned marginalized groups like LGBTQ people, Latinos, Filipinos, and disabled people, and a deeper dive into Black Americans’ history.
Textbooks in Texas now mention Moses (“whose principles...informed the American founding documents”) and downplay the role of slavery as the leading cause of the Civil War.
History standards for Texas, on the other hand, were determined by a panel that, in addition to educators, included business representatives, politicians, and even a pastor. This process has been particularly contentious in Texas since 2010, when members of the state’s board of education changed hundreds of standards to align more with conservative politics than historical knowledge. In turn, their textbooks now mention Moses (“whose principles...informed the American founding documents”) and downplay the role of slavery as the leading cause of the Civil War, instead choosing to emphasize states’ rights.
What’s especially concerning is that Texas’ influence doesn’t stop at its borders. With nearly 50 million books purchased a year, Texas is the second largest textbook-buyer in the country (California is the first) and one of 20 states where the state board decides which textbooks schools will use (rather than the local school district). Though Texas’s influence on the textbook market has waned in recent years, companies still often use the Texas version of American history as a base model for the textbooks they sell to the rest of the country, tweaking it to adjust to other state’s individual standards
According to Gonzales, there are ways to improve the textbook selection process. He advocates for involving more historians in the process of setting standards at the state level. Educators can also get around or supplement the textbooks. School districts around the country, for example, have already incorporated elements from The 1619 Project into their curriculums.
Teaching Tolerance—a project by the Southern Poverty Law Center that provides free resources to educators to develop social justice-oriented lesson plans—advocates for teachers to use trade books, instead of state-sanctioned history textbooks, and to incorporate oral storytelling and the exploration of local history, because they all offer a more nuanced version of history. The organization’s Teaching Hard History resources also fall under this category, with material available for grades K-12.
There’s also a growing trend of teaching young adult books and graphic novels that make history more engaging. Sometimes these texts are adaptations of adult books that have been made more appropriate for young kids.
“A great example of that is Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning being adapted into Stamped, which is a brand new collaboration between Kendi and the young adult author Jason Reynolds,” says Monita K. Bell, managing editor for Teaching Tolerance and host of The Mind Online podcast.
Beyond needing to find alternative teaching material, another roadblock to introducing antiracism in the classroom is that many white teachers aren’t trained to do so. And this is compounded by the fact that the testing standards educators are required to follow continue to emphasize the same old narratives about our country’s history.
“So many [teachers] don’t talk about racism in education at all, or the ways in which curriculum can be racist and harmful to kids,” Bell adds. “When you get trained educators in front of students without that lens, that’s going to have an impact on kids. Antiracism education should be top down in schools…and it needs to be a key component of education training programs.”
“They’re just accepting any old curriculum from publishing companies,” says Muhammad. “The goal is to interrupt these things so they’re more excellent.”
To receive this kind of quality education, advocacy is key. Gonzalez suggests that parents and students should first engage in reading and learning about the diversity of our nation’s history, and then learn what their state’s educational standards and curriculum are like and advocate for needed changes by joining together with like-minded people and speaking with school boards and state representatives.
“Activism and advocacy can look so many different ways, the issue is that people are not doing it as much as they could. They’re just accepting any old curriculum from publishing companies,” says Muhammad. “The goal is to interrupt these things so they’re more excellent.”