American History 101 
From: Jon Wiener 
To: Diane Ravitch 
Subject: How To Revive History by "Teaching the Conflicts" 
Tuesday, May 17, 2005, at 4:17 AM PT 
More than a decade ago, the first Bush 
administration asked historians to draft 
guidelines for what all schoolchildren should 
know about the American past. The resulting 
curriculum guide, however, drew fire from 
critics for being politically correctÑpaying more 
attention to slavery and McCarthyism than to 
battlefield triumphs or great inventors like 
Thomas Edison. The historians and their 
defenders replied that they weren't trying to 
prescribe a fixed catalog of facts to teach but 
rather important themes in the American past 
and habits of mind necessary for thinking 
about history, and that it was necessary to 
teach the bad as well as the good. 
The debate over how history should be taughtÑand what role if any it 
should play in instilling patriotism in childrenÑhas continued. Under the 
current Bush administration, Sen. Robert Byrd sponsored an initiative to 
fund collaborations between secondary schools and professional 
historians. Bush's National Endowment for the Humanities' new "We the 
People" program promotes history education that celebrates America's 
past and its democratic system. To many historians' surprise, the 
federal funding available for history has surged. But how it will be spent 
leads invariably into politics. 
Slate's editors thought that the political questions about the teaching of 
history deserved some informed debate. Most people can probably agree 
that history should neither be an uncritical celebration of bygone heroes 
nor a bill of indictment against dead white men; its purpose is neither to 
build self-esteem nor to indoctrinate. But the middle ground between 
these poles is a difficult one to map. Should history be used to promote 
patriotism and a regard for American democracy? If so, what's wrong 
with its being used also to instill pride among blacks, women, or gays? 
How much should history education focus on heroes and how much on 
debunking myths? Does knowing history make us better citizens? 
With these questions as merely a guide, we've asked Diane Ravitch, 
author of The Language Police, and Jon Wiener, professor of history at 
the University of California at Irvine and author most recently of 
Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud and Politics in the Ivory Tower, to 
debate the issues. 
Dear Diane, 
Debates about how much American students know about their own 
history, and about how our citizens should be taught what they don't 
know, are anything but abstract ones these days. Before we get down to 
the business of discussing those questions, let me set the current 
scene. President Bush campaigned in 2004 with the argument that we 
were fighting in Iraq for freedom and democracy, and that America was 
on a historic mission. Some opponents expressed skepticism about that, 
but the president's re-election suggests that a majority of voters accept 
what historians might call this Wilsonian vision as a justification for war. 
They did this despite the fact that past wars often turned out differently 
from what presidents promised at the beginning, despite what we might 
call the lessons of history. 
While "the lessons of history" provide no simple solutions to today's 
problems and policy conflicts, an effective democracy requires some 
knowledge on the part of its citizens of the nation's past. Of course, "the 
lessons of history" are often disputedÑthe causes of the Civil War, the 
legitimacy of dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, what 
we learned from Vietnam. That is why the best approach in the 
classroom is, as educators say, to "teach the conflicts." Teachers ought 
to say where they stand, and why. But they also have an obligation to be 
fairÑto present the best arguments and evidence for the interpretations 
they disagree with. Then we should invite students to think for 
themselves. 
"Teach the conflicts" was first proposed by Gerald Graff almost 20 years 
ago; his strategy applied to teaching not just history but all of the 
humanities. At a time when the humanities were engaged in a 
protracted battle between traditionalists and postmodernists, Graff 
offered a way out; he argued that honesty requires teaching about 
debates among schools of interpretation. Not surprisingly, some 
traditionalists objected, on the grounds that teaching the conflicts was a 
subversive way to advance the forces of relativismÑand some 
postmodernists objected on the grounds that traditional approaches to 
"truth" had been rendered obsolete. Yet teaching the conflicts 
indisputably makes for great pedagogy because it calls on students to 
engage in critical thinking themselves. 
The first thing that students need to learn about the history of the 
American ideals of democracy and freedom, in my view, is that 
democracy and freedom are not fixed, unchanging qualities given us by 
the founding fathers. The meanings of democracy and freedom have 
often been debated; our history is the history of those debates, of 
battles over the way freedom and democracy should be definedÑand 
practiced. And of course some issues are no longer debatedÑwhether 
slavery is good for Africans, whether women should vote. Still, the 
debates about those issuesÑthe pro-slavery argument, the argument 
against women's suffrageÑremain a significant part of our past and 
ought to be part of the curriculum. (Also they can be fascinating: Should 
women be protected from the "filth" and "degradation" of election 
campaigns, as a California man argued in 1879?) 
Over the past 25 years, "the new social history" has radically 
transformed our ideas about whose voices are part of the debate. Today, 
students study not only political leaders, military heroes, and captains of 
industry, but also working people, slaves, women, immigrants. Today, we 
know something about how freedom was defined by newly freed slaves in 
the years following the Civil War and how advocates of women's suffrage 
challenged the notion that "all men are created equal." Today, we teach 
that history is made not only by the powerful, but also by people who 
once were barely visible to historiansÑby slaves, by striking workers, by 
housewives. 
The fruits of a comprehensive yet subtle focus on conflicting conceptions 
of freedom are nowhere clearer than in Eric Foner's new textbook, Give 
Me Liberty. The book (which is based on his 1998 book, The Story of 
American Freedom) was published last summer and already has been 
assigned at more than 200 colleges and universities. Students should 
study three dimensions of freedom, Foner argues: the changing 
meanings of freedom; "the social conditions that make freedom 
possible"; and the limits of freedom in different periods, the forces that 
made it possible for some to enjoy freedom while others did not. 
The point is not to avoid teaching about American ideals, as some critics 
of this approach might charge; the point is to make sure to teach about 
the gap between ideals and realities as well. The Declaration of 
Independence described liberty as an "inalienable" right, yet the 
founding fathers accepted the existence of slavery. The 
Spanish-American War was fought in the name of democracy and 
freedom, but it ended with a horrifying campaign of counterinsurgency 
against Filipinos and the establishment of American economic domination 
and a long-term military presence in both the Philippines and in Cuba. 
The debate in the 1890s between imperialist and anti-imperialist ideals, 
between Rudyard Kipling's "White Man's Burden" and Mark Twain's 



withering contempt for the war camp, takes on a striking relevance 
today with the Iraq war: Did we fight to bring freedom to the people of 
the Philippines? 
The goal of teaching history through debates is not a celebration of 
American virtue but a more complex appreciation of changes over time in 
the meanings of democracy and freedom. I look forward to hearing your 
thoughts and to working through some of the thorny specific issues 
teachers and textbook writers and standard-setters face. 
Best, 
Jon 
From: Diane Ravitch 
To: Jon Wiener 
Subject: Don't Know Much About History 
Tuesday, May 17, 2005, at 8:12 AM PT 
Dear Jon, 
I approach the issues of teaching history in the schools from a 
somewhat different vantage point than you. Students do need to 
understand that the important issues in history continue to be hotly 
debated today by historians. Students also need to be protected from 
plodding textbooks that give off a phony aura of encyclopedic "truth" 
and that turn history into a deadly boring subject in which all the facts 
are already known. Students also need, to the greatest extent possible, 
to be able to imagine themselves into a past in which decisions were 
made without knowing how things would turn out. 
Here are the basic problems of history in the schools today, as I see 
them: 
One, every national assessment has shown that students don't know 
much history. On the authoritative National Assessment of Educational 
Progress, the scores for U.S. history are consistently the lowest of any 
subject tested; typically more than half of seniors score "below basic," 
the lowest possible rating. In no other subject do a majority of students 
register so little knowledge of a subject taught in school. Defenders of 
the status quo say that students have never known much history, but 
that hardly seems to be an intellectually respectable response, especially 
if you think that history is important, as we do. 
Two, in most states and most schools, history has gotten submerged 
and smothered by social studies. We know what history is, even if we 
argue about the specific issues to be included or how to interpret them. 
Social studies, on the other hand, is a curricular smorgasbord that 
includes all sorts of studies, which collectively diminish the time available 
for history. Social-studies teachers treat history as only one of a dozen 
different "studies" that they cover, and by no means the most 
important. Worse, they emphasize concepts and ignore chronology, 
which makes hash of history. 
Three, because of the dominance of social studies and the diminution of 
history, a large percentage of people who teach history have not studied 
history; instead, they have majored in social-studies education, a social 
science, communications, or any number of other fields, but not history. 
Data collected by the National Center for Education Statistics indicate 
that a majority of people teaching history do not have a major or a minor 
in history. You can understand that when the teacher does not have an 
in-depth knowledge of history, it is very difficult to expect him or her to 
have a secure grasp of complex historical issues and debates and to be 
able to raise probing questions of the conventional accounts. 
Fourth, because of the dominance of social studies and the diminution of 
history, most state standards for social studies give short shrift to 
history. They are usually the product of the state social-studies leaders, 
who come from a wide variety of fields. The latest rating of state history 
standards was written by Sheldon Stern, historian at the John F. 
Kennedy Library in Boston (his analysis was published by the Thomas B. 
Fordham Institute). Stern found only six states (California, 
Massachusetts, New York, Arizona, Alabama, and Indiana) with 
exemplary history standards, where students actually encounter solid 
history. The history standards in 30 states were rated as weak or 
ineffective. Even in states with excellent standards, students may get 
meager history instruction. I heard today from a middle-school teacher 
in New York who surveyed 100 students and found that 95 of them had 
no knowledge of such basic facts as the capital of their state, the name 
of the governor, the identity of Churchill or Stalin, or when the Civil War 
or World War II were fought. 
As our conversation proceeds, I hope we will have a chance to talk about 
some of the genuine problems that occur when history teachers try to 
incorporate the new social history. It turns out to be very difficult to 
teach multiple perspectivesÑthose of housewives, feminists, slaves,



workers, farmers, native Americans, free blacks in the antebellum South, 
Hispanics, plantation ownersÑwhen students don't have a basic grasp of 
the events and ideas, the scaffolding of American history. If you don't 
know the central events and playersÑthe central narrativeÑit is difficult 
to understand the views and behaviors that diverge from the central 
narrative. How can you teach "multiple perspectives" when students 
don't know what happened in the first instance? Nor is it so easy to 
"teach the conflicts." When we teach the Holocaust, do we give equal 
time to those who deny that it even happened? When we teach about 
McCarthyism, do we give equal time to his supporters? When we teach 
about the Ku Klux Klan, should there be any time for their defenders? 
Should there be equal time for abolitionists and pro-slavery voices? This 
goes to the issue of multiple perspectives, but it raises another 
important issue. That is, that teachers and historians who write 
standards need help in figuring out not only what to include but what to 
leave out. That is one of the most difficult issues in teaching history, and 
historians have not been much help to school people in differentiating 
what is most important from what is least important. 
Best, 
Diane