As students head back to the classroom there has been renewed focus on their learning. Many students had to attend classes online, in person, or some version of both. Last year parents were concerned their children did not learn as much as they would have if they were physically in school. A new article from Jeffrey Sikkenga, Executive Director of the Ashbrook Center, posed the question of whether or not we should teach our students about the bad events and practices that happened in our nation’s history. There’s been a push in Louisiana and across the country for schools to adopt Critical Race Theory, the concept that race is a social construct and racism is a part of America’s legal systems and laws. Newell spoke with Sikkenga on how kids are learning - and his suggestion for not necessarily needing textbooks.
“I took a lot of history classes, Newell said. “I loved history and in the teachings we talked about the horrors of slavery. We talked about the peripheral and downstream impacts of slavery. How aggressive does one need to be on teaching about slavery in America?”
“I think we need to go back to our start with our founding and look at those founding principles,” Sikkenga said. “The great Black abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, said that America is defined not by its’ failure to live up to our principles, but by those principles and our history should be understood as a struggle to live up to our founding principles of equality and liberty. I think Douglass’ words do justice to the reality of the injustices that are a part of American history… We shouldn't be defined by our principles, but we should acknowledge when we failed to live up to them.”
“I did try to find out whether there were any studies relative to history classes offered across this country that did exactly what you propose,” Newell said. “In studying the Federalist papers, students learned what early Americans were thinking contemporaneously at that point in time as the maturity of the country started to progress.”
“We've worked with tens of thousands of teachers in every state,” Sikkenga said. “There are great American history and government classes being taught along the lines that I mentioned. Those classrooms really bring history to life and they make it clear to the students that those founding documents are really about who we are as a country and who students are as Americans… They understand America as this unfolding story of a struggle for freedom and it becomes really engaging to students.”
“What’s the resistance to this approach?” Newell asked.
“Some people are resistant because one of the things I argue is we shouldn't be so reliant on textbooks,” Sikkenga said. “A lot of textbooks are boring or they're biased. They have a certain political perspective or agenda, or sometimes they're even both. So I really think one way that we can address this issue is by setting aside the textbooks and reading the primary sources. themselves. If we want to understand the constitution let's read the Federalist Papers. If we want to understand the declaration of dependence, let's read the Declaration of Independence. It was meant to be read by the ordinary Americans of 1776. If they could do it, we can do it.”
“I find today that we're trying to condense everything,” Newell said. “That's how these kids learn. All they deal with today are soundbites and little bitty segments of information.”
“Right, but it doesn't need to be that way,” Sikkenga said. “When students actually read those founding documents their attention span gets longer and they get hungry to know those kinds of things. We can do that in American history and government classrooms.”
Hear the entire interview in the audio player below.
