BY BENJAMIN N. LAWRANCE
This past election cycle many, if not most, eyes were on Ohio. Would it be the seventh state in a row to recognize a woman’s bodily integrity as a constitutional right? In the excitement (or disappointment) last Tuesday, however, the ongoing national struggle over history education received short shrift. Buried in the news, after headlines about Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, and Mississippi, were results from dozens of school board races across the country. And buried further was the drubbing Moms for Liberty received in Pennsylvania, Iowa, Virginia, Minnesota, New Jersey, and elsewhere. For members of the American Historical Association (AHA) like myself, school board elections are often pivotal races because they shape the type and content of history education in public schools across the United States.
Moms for Liberty may be hard to pin down ideologically in some respects. Its website describes its members as “joyful warriors” who stand for truth, build relationships, and empower others. Based in Florida, the organization cut its political teeth waging a revolt against mask mandates during peak COVID-19. Much of its history-centered resources are focused on reading the US Constitution. It provides a “Madison Minute Packet” in its “store,” which contains a treatise entitled “How to Read the Constitution and Declaration of Independence.” More importantly, though, it promotes “constitutional challenges,” including a product designed by Hillsdale College, one of several vehicles overtly rejecting Nikole Hannah-Jones’s and the New York Times’s 1619 Project. AHA members and editors of the American Historical Review continue to engage with this historical education project.
At the risk of downplaying the Ohio result, I want to direct your attention to the importance of school board elections, like that of Pennridge School District, for the right to history education. In 2021, this relatively conservative community in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, with over six thousand school-aged children, was thrust into the national spotlight when its board incumbents were swept out by candidates supported or endorsed by Moms for Liberty, a group the Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled “an anti-government extremist group.” The five Republicans ran on a campaign of “Parents over Politicians,” seeking to halt the district’s diversity, equity, and inclusion initiative and raising questions about curriculum, masks mandates, and taxes.
Over the course of the next two years, however, Pennridge became ground zero for struggles over the right to education and the right to learn history. Within a few months, board members instituted a book-banning policy, aided by the Independence Law Center, the legal arm of the Pennsylvania Family Institute. They subsequently banned pride flags, suspended a teacher who defended LGBTQ students, and implemented a policy that required the school to publicly out LGBTQ students with a “gender identification procedure.” A new rule prohibited student name changes without a note from a parent or guardian.
But it wasn’t until the transformations broadened to include overt historical indoctrination that the eventual backlash really took hold. Earlier in 2023, after the Republican-dominated school district hired Jordan Adams—a “curriculum consultant” and graduate of Hillsdale College, a private Christian institution—parents began to question the board’s actions. Adams has strong opinions about how and what your children should be taught. The board introduced Hillsdale 1776, an “American Classical Education,” billed as “a complete collection of lesson plans for teaching American history, civics, and government to K-12 students.” It contains no distinct units on the trans-Atlantic slave trade, slavery in American life, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, or African Americans’ centuries-long struggles for freedom, safety, humanity, and equality.
This past November voters in Pennridge delivered their verdict on Hillsdale’s historical indoctrination camouflaged as a liberty-centered curriculum.
Learning is one of the joys of being human; to deny this is to deny a human right. As a historian teaching in the United States, I am grateful to belong to a professional organization that has committed itself to advocating for honesty and integrity in public education. The American Historical Association’s “Freedom to Learn” initiative is a step toward justice, but a leap is required. It is not enough to oppose the “divisive concept” laws that reactionary state assemblies have enacted from Florida to Texas to Iowa: we must act.
It is for this reason that I will be supporting the resolution “In Defense of the Right to Learn” at the upcoming conference of the American Historical Association in San Francisco. On January 6, 2024, attendees of the business meeting will have the opportunity to call on Association members to speak and write in support of academic freedom nationally and to organize against disinformation locally. To ask historians to resist state legislatures and school boards that oppose an honest reckoning with the past is not mere politics—it is existential. The resolution is a leap—albeit a modest one—toward activating our profession to defend itself.
Voters are already acting. As scholarly professionals, it is time to take a side.
In Defense of the Right to Learn
[Submitted to the Business Meeting of the American Historical Association, January 6, 2024]
Whereas, Council’s Guiding Principles on Taking a Public Stance (2017) specify that “In a wide range of situations, whether involving the rights and careers of individual historians, historical practice in diverse venues, or the role of history in public culture, the AHA has the responsibility to take public stands.”
Whereas, Council further stipulated, as an example, “When public or private authorities…censor or seek to prevent the writing, publication, exhibition, teaching, or other practices of history or seek to punish historians…for conclusions they have reached and evidence they have unearthed as a result of legitimate historical inquiry,” mandating that “The AHA should defend historians, regardless of institutional affiliations or lack thereof, against efforts to limit their freedom of expression, or to punish them for ideas, grounded in legitimate historical inquiry, they have expressed or material they have uncovered.”
Whereas, numerous state legislatures and officials are censoring the teaching of history in public schools and universities;
Whereas, said legislation mandates the distortion of scholarship about such central topics as slavery, the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, and LGBTQ people;
Whereas, under pressure from partisan groups, school boards across the country are forcing teachers to censor their treatment of these issues in their classes and libraries are removing canonical books in literature and history from their shelves;Whereas, teachers and librarians who resist these measures have faced personal attacks and threats;
Therefore, the Association calls on its members to:
- Support AHA actions to uphold accuracy in history teaching;
- Organize on your campus against the attacks on history and historians;
- Defend academic freedom and job security for history teachers at every level;
- Write editorials and letters-to-the-editor defending teachers, librarians, and school board members;
- Testify before legislative bodies and school boards about the right to learn.
Benjamin N. Lawrance is professor of history at the University of Arizona, and the series editor of the new six-volume Cultural History of Slavery and Human Trafficking, forthcoming with Bloomsbury in 2024.
See also Cory James Young’s blog post, “Historians Must Affirm the Right to Learn,” in support of the AHA resolution.
