Erik J. Chaput
Erik J. Chaput teaches in the School of Continuing Education at Providence College and at Western Reserve Academy. He is the author of “The People’s Martyr: Thomas Wilson Dorr and His 1842 Rhode Island Rebellion” (2013).
Over the last 30 years, the politics that surrounds the teaching of American history has from time to time burst into the mainstream. For U.S. History teachers preparing to work with students in the classroom in the coming weeks, there will be no shortage of political minefields to navigate.
As historian Matthew Karp noted recently in Harper’s magazine, the study of history is a “battleground where we must meet the vast demands of the ever-living now.” Our culture wars are not only about the rough and tumble surface of cultural life. They also deal with the clash over public symbols, discourse, and the enduring myths of society. Though today’s warring political factions are guilty of flattening multidimensional stories, often about race in America, each side believes that they have a hotline to Clio, the muse of History, making the teacher’s job that much more challenging.
As a nation, sitting on knife’s edge, we have been here before. The debate over how to teach, to celebrate, and be critical of American history has been a perennial part of the culture wars. The question of whether the chronicles of the American past in textbooks should fall on the celebratory or condemnatory spectrum is nothing new. In 1993, a public battle was waged over new national history standards.
Lynne Cheney, then chair of the National Endowment of the Humanities, led a charge against historical standards drafted by the late historian Gary B. Nash and several others. According to Cheney, the end product lacked a patriotic element that was necessary in the classroom. Of course, one can find similar sentiments expressed as far back as the 1920s. Recently this debate has played out in controversies surrounding the New York Times’ 1619 Project and the Trump administration’s counter-effort, the 1776 Commission and its connected report.
Sociologist James Davidson Hunter’s landmark study, “Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America,” should be required reading for teachers as they prepare for the fall semester. Hunter’s work, which is enjoying its 30th anniversary this year, remains a must read for those looking to further their understanding of the fault lines that have developed in modern America.
Hunter’s “Culture Wars” chronicles the fundamental alterations in America since the 1960s and how they have led to a greater level of division. According to Hunter, by the end of the 20th century, a battle was raging between conservatives who were committed to an “external, definable, and transcendent authority,” and liberals who were “defined by the spirit of the modern age, of rationalism and subjectivism.” The “competing visions, and the rhetoric that sustains them” were threatening to become the “defining forces of public life.”
In one of his last major essays in The New Republic in the early 1990s, Irving Howe, the prominent literary critic, noted that a “serious education must assume, in part, an adversarial stance toward the very society that sustains it … But if that criticism loses touch with the heritage of the past, it becomes weightless, a mere compendium of momentary complaints.”
This is indeed the balancing act that classroom teachers must perform. If teachers paper-over complexity and nuance, if they shut down debate and dismiss opposing views, they lose the ability to explain anything that happens over time, relying on weak and ineffectual metaphors. We must not be, as the abolitionist Frederick Douglass noted after the Civil War, “apostles of forgetfulness.”
