Florida Republicans are well-known for their attempts to literally rewrite the past. In 2022, the state legislature passed the so-called Stop W.O.K.E. Act to prohibit classroom discussions that might provoke “guilt, anguish, or psychological distress” among students about the history of their race or gender. Only a year later, Florida’s State Board of Education released new standards for African American History requiring that teachers explain how enslaved people “benefitted” from the skills they developed in bondage.
Now, in yet another attempt at historical cleansing, Florida officials have unveiled FACT U.S. History, the state’s conservative alternative to the College Board’s Advanced Placement United States History (APUSH) course. Born of concerns from conservative think tanks that APUSH is too left, too woke, and too critical of the United States, FACT U.S. offers a more sanitized and homogenous national narrative. Critics argue that by cutting nuance, FACT U.S. manufactures a mythological patriotism that reinforces American exceptionalism, overrepresents Protestantism, whitewashes imperialism, and downplays injustice and inequality.
As noted by the American Historical Association, the new curriculum advances a conservative political ideology by distorting the framing of its content. For example, FACT U.S. praises former President Ronald Reagan’s policies of deregulation and tax cuts for sparking economic growth, creating twenty million jobs, and taming inflation. But debate about runaway deficits caused by the tax cuts is reduced to a throwaway line, and discussion of the long-term social and political consequences of Reaganomics is nonexistent. Yet when it comes to the New Deal, criticism is central. Students study the National Recovery Act (NRA) to learn “the limits of centralized planning” while also reading from Herbert Hoover’s 1934 book, The Challenge to Liberty, which accuses New Deal programs of invading and destroying American liberties.
Of course, critics have also noted dozens of glaring omissions in the curriculum. A sampling includes the Black Panthers and the Brown Berets, the Chicano Movement and the American Indian Movement, the Stonewall Uprising, and redlining. All disappear in Florida’s telling of our national story.
As an AP U.S. History teacher who also writes exam questions for the College Board, I echo these critiques. Yet it is also worth examining how FACT U.S. fits within a more enduring national debate, one as old as public education itself: Should “patriotic” education cultivate civic-mindedness and democratic critique, or engender obedience and nationalist loyalty?
Far from neutral, the first free, tax-supported, universal public schools—known as common schools—held a complicated set of goals. Beginning in the 1830s, common schools—as intended by their principal architect, Horace Mann—aimed to meet the labor needs of an industrial workforce while cultivating patriotism, preparing citizens for participation in a democratic society, and instilling Protestant values in newcomers, especially Roman Catholic immigrants from Germany and Ireland.
In Pillars of the Republic, the classic 1983 book on the origins of American public schools, Carl Kaestle argues that industrialization created demand for discipline, punctuality, and regimentation that was met by the school system. But he also adds that as immigration and economic inequality sparked class division, common schools responded by emphasizing patriotism and “social harmony.” Political leaders, Kaestle writes, “looked to free common schools to provide a common language, common mores,” and “popular acceptance of the conditions of American economic life.”
In short, public schooling was never apolitical. Even in its infancy, universal public education was deeply entangled with the needs of industry and the state, addressing questions about what it means to make Americans and how to generate national unity within a diverse population.
But there was always disagreement among educators about what it meant to instill patriotism and “Americanize” foreigners. Although Horace Mann emphasized assimilation and national unity, his suggestion that “a republican form of government” would devolve into chaos “without intelligence in the people” implied danger in cultivating unthinking patriotism. As such, a patriotic education also required generating respect for democratic institutions and preparing citizens to participate in them. The latter required that citizens be equipped with critical capacities developed in schools.
To be sure, this critical approach to patriotism was not dominant in nineteenth century schools. Instead, propagandistic schoolbooks called McGuffey Readers aided children in discovering the moral foundations of America in Puritan Massachusetts, learning virtue from the legends of George Washington, and finding so-called savagery in Indigenous people. And by the late 1800s, most schools unabashedly emphasized loyalty, obedience, and conformity as expressions of patriotism. In addition to reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, students in this era often read from A Patriotic Primer for the Little Citizen, which taught that “the first step in learning to govern ourselves is to learn how to obey—to be Obedient to Government.”
In the case of American Indian boarding schools in the late 1800s, the loyalty-as-patriotism approach amounted to violent cultural warfare. Under the mantra “Kill the Indian, save the man,” Indigenous students were sent to faraway schools to endure an abusive process of “Americanization”: They were forced to cut their hair, change their style of dress, and speak English, all with the aim of transforming them into patriotic Christian farmers. Those caught speaking their native language or practicing tribal spiritual traditions were beaten and often subjected to solitary confinement. In these residential schools, patriotism was recast as submission to the state.
Although less apparent in schools, the critical approach to patriotism—one that asks citizens to hold their country accountable to its loftiest values—flourished among activist movements in the nineteenth century. Women at Seneca Falls did not simply demand the right to vote; they framed a call for equal treatment in the language of the Declaration of Independence, holding as “self-evident” that “all men and women are created equal.” Similarly, Frederick Douglass reminded Americans of their hypocrisy when he asked, in a historic 1852 speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”
These activists reached for the most famous words in the Declaration and attempted to pull the nation closer to them. Their patriotism was rooted in American ideals like democratic participation—ideals from which they had been categorically excluded. In response to that exclusion, they built a tradition that viewed the country as a work in progress rather than a static achievement—one in which critique could be an expression of patriotism.
In my experience writing APUSH exam questions, this is the tradition of patriotism within which the College Board’s US History course operates. To be clear, I do not speak for the College Board: I am only one of many independent contractors asked to identify sources and write exam questions. Still, the source requests I receive reveal a great deal about the course’s underlying vision of American history, as does the exam itself.
The requests I get from the College Board run the gamut. One month, it might be a primary source from a conservative female author writing since 1980. The next could be a secondary source on The Gilded Age. And in another month, there may be a flurry of requests that include competing perspectives from historians of the New Deal, Southern views of Reconstruction, or charts chronicling declining trust in government since the Vietnam War.
Together, these sources comprise an exam that asks students to make sense of multiple perspectives on the breadth of American history, from the Revolution and the origins of the Constitution, to the role of westward expansion in causing the Civil War, to the tension between labor and capital in the late nineteenth century. It’s an exam that asks students not to merely know that the size of government grew in the twentieth century, but to craft arguments about what drove that growth and why some, especially later in the century, felt it had gone too far.
In the course of their year in APUSH, students are expected to think from the perspectives of Americans of every race, class, religion, and political orientation. They are made to consider foundational American ideals, with examples of successes and failures in attempts to realize them. In grappling with diverse perspectives, students learn how to disagree and, in the process, become better prepared for life in a pluralistic democracy. And contrary to the view of some conservatives, APUSH does not ask students to love America less. It only asks them to understand the country more fully.
But Florida’s FACT U.S. moves in the opposite direction, asking students to love America more while exposing them to less of its story. It treats historical injustices as temporary deviations from American principles. Yet as APUSH students learn with the cases of slavery and the dispossession of Native Americans, these injustices, which indeed were deviations from core national values, were also central to the economic expansion of the United States—a fact that easily segues into relevant discussions about how the crimes of the past might be alive in the outcomes of the present.
These critical discussions leave AP students with a sense that action is still required, and that the American project remains incomplete and aspirational—something to fight for. This, I suspect, is exactly what FACT U.S. authors hope to prevent. For them, America is a finished project, completed some time ago, and patriots are those who hold fast to that mythical moment when it was perfected. For the rest of us, history studied in earnest still reveals an unfinished America.