There is a simple step America’s educators can take to improve civic awareness dramatically. Teach history backward.
That’s how I learned it. One of the best teachers I ever had was a man who taught me high school history. On the first day of class, he announced that we would be learning U.S. history starting with recent events. We began with Watergate and the Vietnam War, then moved back through the 1950s, the Red Scare, and the Korean War. From there, we covered World War II, the Great Depression, then the 1920s. Eventually, near the end of the school year, we found ourselves in the American Revolution.
It was a curriculum that worked brilliantly. It was the early 1980s, and Vietnam was something very real to those of us in high school and college. Many of us had friends, neighbors, and family members who had served in the war. It was exciting to study the conflict.
It also made liberal bias very difficult to weaponize. When the topic being taught involves living people who can challenge the accuracy of the curriculum, it makes it hard to bowdlerize the truth the way something like the “1619 Project” does.
In high school, I saw this in action. Our teacher presented both sides of the Vietnam War, both the anti-war movement and the men who had gone over there to fight. One memorable afternoon, we had, as a guest speaker, a Vietnam veteran. When one of the faculty members in the assembly got up to give a lecture about the “immoral war,” the man shot back: “All I know is we were there to fight communism and things got a lot worse when we left.”