The Slippery Matter of ‘Truth’ in Patriotic Education

At last count, Republicans have introduced bills in more than half of the states to restrict the teaching of what they regard to be “critical race theory.” Eleven states have enacted bans. The language of these measures, while varying slightly from state to state, is drawn from a template provided by the Trump administration’s 2020 executive order banning federal agencies from engaging in “anti-racism training.”

Most of the debate around these measures has focused on the merits of The New York Times’s “1619 Project,” which several of these bills specifically ban from public schools, or on the definition of critical race theory itself. Meanwhile, one vitally important ideological shift that these laws represent has been overlooked. Unlike crusades for “patriotic education” in the past that justified censorship and romanticized history on the grounds that these were necessary for civic progress, today’s GOP defends its version of American history on the basis that it’s more factual than the accounts they wish to suppress.

For most of the last two centuries, patriotic schooling was not a partisan issue. Both conservatives and progressives were united in packing schoolrooms with flags, pledges, anthems, and star-spangled lessons. Conservatives may have done so reflexively while progressives saw public education as a key engine of reform, Americanizing unruly immigrants, purifying government, and countering the nation’s slide into economic oligarchy.

Yet unlike today, champions of patriotic education then distinguished between patriotism and truth. When New York State mandated the display of the flag and the distribution of a 400-page Manual of Patriotism to every classroom in 1898, there was an understanding that patriotic education was not, and need not be, entirely factual. The first pages of the Manual of Patriotism warned teachers, “Do not look upon this Manual as a text-book in American history.” It then elaborated:

There are many good books that give the facts, and some that attempt the philosophy of the subject. But this does not pretend to do either. I am of the mind that neither facts nor philosophy alone, nor both combined, can create the sentiment of patriotism, much less foster and strengthen it in the minds and hearts of children. Be yourselves well grounded in the facts, and teach them as may be needful. … But when you take this book in your hands, let the light of sentiment and imagination play over facts and theories — tingeing all as with the beautiful Red, White and Blue of the Flag.

In the 1920s, when influential historians like David Muzzey and Charles Beard pointed out that Americans may have had other motives for breaking with England than just spreading Enlightenment ideals, some textbooks began to appear with critical appraisals of Washington and Jefferson. But the defenders of a more unblemished narrative did not stake their position on the argument that their version of history was more accurate. New York City’s superintendent of education attacked historical revisionism and defended patriotic textbooks without claiming that those textbooks were inaccurate. “To my mind, a distinction should be drawn between the obligation to cleave closely to the line of historical truth, such as is incumbent upon the historian writing for adult readers and the discretion properly conceded to an author of school texts who writes for immature minds,” he instructed a committee empaneled to review textbooks in 1922.

His blue-ribbon committee of teachers and principals agreed and stated as a rule that textbooks must begin with an “aim” that is “sufficiently extensive in scope to permit marshaling the facts in due subordination.” Since children’s minds are incapable of “fine-spun differentiations,” they should only be given “the facts which will lead him to understand that liberty is a priceless jewel; that he should be proud of his country; and that he should yield obedience to constituted authority.”

In those days, Left and Right hewed to the same philosophy of education in seeing schools and curricula not as places to investigate truth but for molding either law-abiding citizens or proper rebels. It was a socialist who wrote the “Pledge of Allegiance” as a vehicle of patriotic education. Communists frankly referred to their textbooks as “propaganda” and openly scrubbed them of “bourgeois” values and “ideas harmful to the working class.” Both conservatives and socialists worshipped America’s founders, as U.S. radicals rebranded communism as fulfilling rather than replacing Jeffersonian ideals. The American Communist Party named its flagship school in New York City the “Jefferson School of Social Science.”

It is only recently that conservatives have claimed that a traditional patriotic education is both more wholesome and more factual. Where their forebears attacked revisionist history on the grounds that these ideas were dangerous or un-American, today many conservatives have grown uniquely confident that certain historical interpretations can be banned because they are wrong both ethically and factually.

Case in point is Sen. Josh Hawley’s “Love America Act of 2021.” Except for its swaggering historical certainty, it is in many ways a throwback to the patriotic educational practices of a century ago. The act would require that all students be taught to “recite” the Pledge of Allegiance, and the preambles to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. It would also prohibit federal funding of any educational institution that teaches the “misinformation” that America’s “core institutions” or “foundational texts,” such as the Constitution, are “products of white supremacy or racism.”

André da Loba for The Chronicle

Where once patriotic educators would have been comfortable extolling the virtues of the founders while being quietly conscious of their faults and contradictions, supporters of the “Love America Act” march against discomforting knowledge with the fatuous conviction that the facts are lined up behind them. “The best antidote to misinformation is the truth,” the proposed law declares, and “it is the policy of the United States that students ... should learn the truth about the history and documents relating to the founding of the United States.”

Flushed with such ontological certainty, some state Republican legislators have included in their anti-CRT bills requirements that, as Florida’s new rules state: “Instruction on the required topics must be factual and objective, and may not suppress or distort significant historical events.” Ohio’s pending legislation requires that teachers strive to teach “controversial issues of public policy or social affairs” from “diverse and contending perspectives.” Legislators in Maine directed the state board of education to draft specific rules “prohibiting teachers in public schools from engaging in political, ideological or religious advocacy in the classroom.” Republicans in Texas included in their draft the provision that any teacher choosing to discuss a controversial subject “shall, to the best of the teacher’s ability, strive to explore the topic from diverse and contending perspectives without giving deference to any one perspective.” Such requirements sit like a steel trap ready to snap back on their creators.

A prime example is the slick and extensive patriotic lesson plans developed by Hillsdale College named The Hillsdale 1776 Curriculum. Kathleen O’Toole, Hillsdale’s assistant provost for K-12 education, contrasted the 1776 Curriculum with “The 1619 Project” on the basis of its being more factual, rather than more appropriate for molding future citizens. “The 1619 project has already made up its mind about the nature of our founding and it gives students curriculum based on this opinion.” O’Toole explained, “We’re not telling students this is what you ought to believe. We’re telling them, here are the facts, here’s the information.” Hillsdale’s President, Larry P. Arnn, in the introduction to the 1776 Curriculum, also states its purpose as correcting the historical record rather than better serving the patriotic needs of education: “Controversies about history, like controversies about everything, can only be resolved by looking at the facts.” This idea that the 1776 Curriculum is an antidote to liberal “cherry-picking, obscuring, or even fabricating ‘facts’ to fit our preconceived notions,” runs throughout the text.

Prominent among the indisputable “facts” that the 1776 Curriculum highlights are that “northern” delegates to the Continental Congress conceded dropping references to slavery in the Declaration of Independence because doing so “would be more likely to lead to the abolition of slavery than splitting with the southern colonies over the issue.” That members of the Second Continental Congress understood that the Declaration’s ringing assertion that “all men are created equal” would “make slavery impossible.” That the Constitution of 1787 was actually an anti-slavery document as it placed “more limits on slavery on a national scale than had previously existed” and was “one of the first significant moves to restrict slavery anywhere in the world at that time.”

There is not space or time here to address all the documentary and interpretative nuances of these supposedly obvious facts. It is sufficient merely to point out that each of these statements are subjects of active debate among historians. In other words, they are ongoing controversies in which there is more than one valid interpretation. To teach history from only one perspective, as The Hillsdale 1776 Curriculum clearly does, would seem to run afoul of the spirit, if not the letter of many of the new anti-CRT laws.

Nevertheless, modern conservatism has forgotten that its most powerful arguments have always been based on principle not evidence. It remains to be seen whether conservatives’ new and quixotic embrace of what they assume are facts will bear the weight of reality. Perhaps they will soon realize that they were better off accepting comforting but dubious stories because they were useful and ennobling, not because they were true.