Really bizarre that this happened on the same day that @TIME published the @obwax piece I consulted on about how this exact political anxiety is a predictable cycle in the history of US history education. 1/

https://twitter.com/TIME/status/1306654658828677120?s=20 https://twitter.com/JenniferJJacobs/status/1306672271973646343

I got to spend an hour chatting w/ Waxman about this trend. I'm working on a book project about textbook history (especially how US history textbooks present the history of the wars of westward expansion against Native nations), & this cycle is a key piece of that story. 2/

When I was researching this history, I ran across so many examples of this sort of anxious patriotism targeting US history in schools it almost became comical. Some of the screeds published seemed almost copy pasted across decades, they were so predictable. 3/

When I get past a couple deadlines I'm going to dig back into those files & see how much of this century-old language this EO & accompanying rant from POTUS repeats. The triggers for these anxieties change, but this is an old playbook. There are lessons we need to learn. 4/

A few: 1) We as a society need to learn to trust our children to think. When we try to make US history courses schools for patriotism, they usually become schools for white nationalism. History is complex. Children can understand that. Let us teach complexity. 5/

2) US history education has always been a partisan & ideological battleground. I looked through my timeline to find where the cycles of these battles fell - it was easier to find the handful of years when they didn't. We are deeply anxious a/b teaching this. We should ask why. 6/

3) Teaching US history has always fundamentally been an arguing about defining American identity. This debate isn't about teaching students to understand the past, it's about telling them who we think they should think they are. 7/

4) We get it wrong a lot, because teaching complexity is incredibly difficult & most of us didn't weren't taught that way. Historical research requires intellectual humility. Teaching historical work also requires humility. Patriotic curriculum has no room for humility. 8/

5) Students crave complex histories. When we hand them nationalist propaganda, we fail our moral duty to them as teachers & teach them to be cynics. As Paul Robert Hanna wrote in his defense of his curriculum, that's incredibly dangerous for democracy: 9/

"To deny our youth a chance to study a balanced statement of the good and evil in our own nation and in the world is to render our future citizens weak and unprepared for the struggle of our time." - Hanna, 1948 10/

Finally: the fight to indoctrinate students in white nationalist propaganda under the guise of US history curriculum is relentless. They don't rest. If we want to teach students to think well about the past, we can't either. 11/11

Follow up: I really need that edit button, Twitter gods.

Oh, and here's @NCSSNetwork doing the good work of defending teachers' freedom to teach, just as they have for over a century. I have so many of these in my files: https://www.socialstudies.org/current-events-response/teaching-about-slavery-using-1619-project-and-other-resources?utm_content=140189542&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&hss_channel=fbp-180384458088