GUEST EDITORIAL: Learning with Gratitude
As another Thanksgiving approaches, we again should invoke Lincoln’s “mystic chords of memory.”
By Rick Hess
SENIOR FELLOW AND DIRECTOR, EDUCATION POLICY STUDIES, AEI
The Advance is running with permission this piece on teaching American history that first appeared in Education Next.
It’s Thanksgiving, and not a moment too soon. In an era when demagogues and fools on the left and right have found fame and fortune by celebrating Stalin, praising Putin, giddily talking up civil war, murdering health executives, and fantasizing about killing their political opponents, this is a holiday with special resonance for American education. Now, that sounds very old school at a time when most high school seniors say theirs is a second-rate nation. I mean, you needn’t look very hard to find classroom materials that depict Thanksgiving as just another evil exercise in settler colonialism.
Old school or not, though, gratitude is the lifeblood of healthy schools and civic institutions. Happily, the nation’s teachers seem to get this. While the performative jackassery of a few can foster the impression that teachers as a whole have soured on the American project, that’s decidedly not the case. A new national survey recently published by EdNext finds that most teachers think schools should teach students that the U.S. is “a fundamentally good country.” Indeed, they’re more likely to say that than the average American. Most teachers, quite correctly, also say that we should teach students to question the policies of their nation’s government.
This sounds about right. We should ask hard questions. But we ought not allow that healthy reflection to elide or obscure our bounteous blessings. Mike McShane and I discussed this at length last year in our book, Getting Education Right. I shared an extended passage in a Thanksgiving post last year and, with your indulgence, I’m inclined to do so again. We wrote:
If you ever find yourself in Washington, D.C., on a crisp fall afternoon, take a walk around the National Mall. Now, it is easy to grow jaded, to see all the monuments and museums as decoration adorning the corrupt, self-dealing, and self-important “swamp.” But try to set that aside for a few hours and focus on recalling the dreams, struggles, and triumphs embodied in those edifices of marble and bronze.
On a perch above the Potomac River’s Tidal Basin sits the Jefferson Memorial, with a portico featuring Jefferson’s uncompromising proclamation, “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” Among the cherry blossoms and deep blue sky, we are simultaneously reminded of the grandeur of the third president and his staggering accomplishments but also his too-human frailties and hypocrisies. It was the slave-owning author of the Declaration of Independence, after all, who intoned, “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever. Commerce between master and slave is despotism.”
Around the river’s bend, anchoring one end of the National Mall, stands the Lincoln Memorial—a temple to the man who led our union when justice would no longer sleep. Etched into its marble walls one can find, in their entirety, two of the greatest speeches ever given on American soil: the Gettysburg Address, “That we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain. That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. And that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the Earth,” and Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds . . . and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”
Walking the path between these two icons, one encounters the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial, with Lei Yixin’s towering granite statue flanked by a majestic river vista and a massive granite wall studded with King’s timeless prose. It is easy to pause and get lost in the words. The eye cannot help but catch the steadfast pledge from his bus boycott speech: “We are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until justice runs down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream.” However unsettled our times may seem, we are struck by King’s admonition from far more troubled ones: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.”
What a heritage. Standing in the shadow of their legacies, one’s heart quickens with thankfulness that we are the ones fortunate enough to inherit the nation they helped to build. One is reminded of the debt we owe to these men and the countless thousands honored by memorials to the veterans of World War II, Korea, and Vietnam who gave their lives so that we might live in a more free, equal, and just world.
Today, our public discourse too rarely acknowledges that we’re the fortunate heirs of an extraordinary legacy, one produced by centuries of flawed Americans grappling with the privileges and burdens of citizenship. Our forbearers sold slaves and abolished slavery; they defeated the Nazis and imprisoned Japanese-Americans in internment camps. Our nation has weathered virulent anti-Catholic sentiment, the reign of Jim Crow, the rise and fall of the KKK, the Great Depression, devastating wars, the Soviet menace, the schisms of Vietnam, urban riots, pandemics, and assassinations. We’ve survived all of it, learned and grown, and turned to confront new challenges. Ours is a tale of sacrifice, reflection, courage, deliberation, patience, magnanimity, and even civil war.
We do a crude disservice to this complicated legacy when we reduce it to caricature. That was true back when schools reduced American history to a hero’s tale of manifest destiny, Paul Bunyan, and George Washington’s refusal to tell a lie. But, with an energetic assist from Howard Zinn and his disciples, that narrative was pushed to the margins more than a generation ago. Today, the one-dimensional caricature tends to lean the other way, depicting our nation as a menagerie of bad acts and bad actors.
While I’m encouraged by surveys showing that teachers are generally up on America, I remain deeply frustrated by how they’re taught to think about their nation. In more than three decades in and around teacher preparation, I’ve observed that teachers have been encouraged to teach about the U.S. in a manner that’s at odds with how they’re urged to teach about (literally) every other nation. When it comes to students from Nicaragua or Nigeria, Syria or Sri Lanka, teachers are told to respect their heritage, honor their traditions, and not belittle their country of origin. Yet, when it comes to our founders, traditions, and history, the rules are very different. All too often, ed school courses, professional development workshops, and popular texts seem to imagine that pride in our shared story is evidence of ignorance. Indeed, it’s fair to suspect that America’s students still encounter one-sided caricatures of their country that would be deemed irresponsible if the subject were any other nation.
It’s time to reject such self-abasement. Now, the answer is not rebelling against mindless left-wing dogma by embracing the mindless right-wing invective of fascist fanboys like Nick Fuentes, Andrew Tate, and Tucker Carlson. The corrective for woke anti-Americanism on campus and in teacher workshops is not the venomous, nativist anti-Americanism of the too-online radical right. Rather, it’s a confident recommitment to the founding principles of liberty, equality, and a government of laws.
Schools should endeavor to help students understand just how much we have to be thankful for without shying away from America’s sins and stumbles. This really shouldn’t be that hard, given that this is where most Americans land. Americans of all races and creeds tend to say ours is a good country populated by good people. That should give us hope and sustenance. As usual, Lincoln said it best, in his first inaugural 160-odd years ago: “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” This Thanksgiving, let’s commit ourselves to ensuring that our schools and colleges are cultivating those mystic chords of memory.
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Thank you, teachers, for your dedication!
You are great and we are grateful.
Happy Thanksgiving.