Some Republican lawmakers in Concord wish to condemn current and future generations of New Hampshire schoolchildren to the same highly selective and frequently sanitized account of the nation’s past that many older Americans encountered in the history classrooms of their own youth. This is such a terrible idea that it is hard to know where to begin.
Actually, not that hard. Let’s begin with the text of the legislation itself. Its sole virtue being brevity, it is possible to reproduce here the relevant passage in its entirety: “No teacher shall advocate any doctrine or theory promoting a negative account or representation of the founding and history of the United States of America in New Hampshire public schools which does not include the worldwide context of now outdated and discouraged practices. Such prohibition includes but is not limited to teaching that the United States was founded on racism.” Teachers who violate the provisions would be subject to disciplinary measures.
The bill’s sponsors might as well add a requirement that science teachers instruct their students that the Earth is flat.
As it happens, this remarkable assault on historical truth and academic freedom appears as an amendment to a Cold-War-era statute “relative to teachers’ loyalty,” a title that carries an unmistakable whiff of McCarthyism. That ugly period of American life presumably would have to be presented to students in a favorable light if the bill wins approval in the Legislature and is signed into law by the governor.
Also prohibited is the advocacy of any doctrine or theory that includes overthrowing by force the government of the United States. This seems superfluous; we strongly doubt that any New Hampshire teachers are encouraging their students to emulate the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, which is about the only group we know of currently that includes people dedicated to overthrowing the government by force.
History, of course, is not, and cannot be, written in stone. It is always subject to revision as new facts come to light, new sources are consulted and new techniques of analysis and interpretation are applied. What teachers can do, and ought to do, is expose their students to multiple historical traditions and interpretations and provide them with the tools to assess their factual basis and intellectual credibility.
An example of a cultural and historical tradition that has done much damage is that of the “Lost Cause,” which influenced public school teaching for many years. A rare case of the losers writing the history of a war, this largely mythical interpretation was invented after the Civil War by apologists for the Confederacy who wanted to portray the war as a struggle not over slavery but as one in which the South sought to vindicate states’ rights and to preserve a way of life in which benevolent slave owners and contented slaves lived in agrarian harmony. This tortured bit of romanticism paved the way for the Jim Crow era and somehow became so deeply rooted in American life that even today the Confederate battle flag is displayed everywhere from rallies by white supremacists to vehicles and the occasional front porch of homes here in the Upper Valley. This is history that needs to be debunked.
The legislation’s primary sponsor, Rep. Alicia Lekas, R-Hudson, says that she only seeks to ensure that when slavery is discussed in the classroom, it is presented in the worldwide context that it existed in many societies at many times. We wonder if she has reflected on the fact that those other societies that were engaged in slavery were not at the same time proclaiming “that all men are created equal and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” and that among these are “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
The American story is in large measure one of the continuing tension between the nation’s high ideals and its attempts, sometimes successful and often not, to attain them. In our view, that’s a history worth telling in its unvarnished form.