I love America. I love it for what it is. But I don’t always love what it does. My love for my country is not based on circumstance or performance. It is an unconditional love that does not ignore its flaws.
My training in history enables my practice of this love. I’ve learned tools of investigation and interpretation that allow me to wrestle with moral tensions and proactively try to better understand the United States throughout its complex past.
As an educator and the executive director of the history education nonprofit Thinking Nation, I believe schools need to reevaluate history instruction to empower students to contemplate historical tensions and enable a type of patriotism that transcends our polarizing moment. Such patriotism differs from the one articulated in President Donald Trump’s recent executive order that directs history education to become a “celebration of America’s greatness and history.” The order inappropriately champions an “accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring” characterization of American history. But accuracy and honesty do not always lead to unity and inspiration.
Schools must approach history differently. When we history educators teach the subject as a discipline defined by investigation and interpretation, students can better confront the crippling nature of singular narratives like American greatness or American oppression. This reorientation can cultivate a rising generation of people equipped with civic dispositions that are necessary to sustain a democracy.
Civic Season, an initiative from the history education network Made By Us, can help us in this critical reevaluation. This new season encourages young people to celebrate the time between Juneteenth and Independence Day by learning about and volunteering in their community. July 4th represents the founding of a nation that was defined by democratic principles even as it clung to the sin of slavery. June 19th, a holiday that commemorates the ending of slavery in America, represents a renewal of those principles—but this time repenting of that sin. Together, these holidays exemplify the ultimate aim of our Constitution: to form a more perfect union. Both are necessary.
I fear, though, that Americans are divided. Some people will rejoice on Juneteenth, celebrating liberation from bondage. Others will not begin their celebration until July 4th, despite Juneteenth’s designation as a federal holiday. Many Americans who proudly fly the American flag just two weeks later demonstrate a willful ignorance of the beauty of Juneteenth. We cannot continue to let this happen. Equipping our students with both patriotism and a high-quality history education can help.
I recently found my own unconditional love of country reflected in a surprising place. I was reading Orthodoxy (1908), in which the British philosopher G.K. Chesterton, a Roman Catholic, warns against sifting through history for a rational foundation on which to build our patriotism. When our love of country must be justified by a specific historical triumph or ideal, he argues, we are apt to falsify history to maintain the illusion of its greatness.
If, as the president’s recent executive order directs, our history education requires students to examine “how the United States has admirably grown closer to its noble principles throughout its history,” that education will likely deemphasize the atrocities committed against American Indians during Westward Expansion or the longevity of systemic racism through Jim Crow laws after Reconstruction. Doing so may create in our young citizens a brittle pride in America’s perceived greatness that relies on cherry-picked facts.
Chesterton’s solution was not a blind love, but an unconditional one. Only when our love of country transcends circumstance or any narrow interpretation of its history are we free to make that country better.
“The man who is most likely to ruin the place he loves is exactly the man who loves it with a reason,” he wrote. “The man who will improve the place is the man who loves it without a reason.” An unconditional love of country, then, gives us clarity in strengthening our democracy.
This clarity is what French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville called a “reflective patriotism.” But reflective patriotism is only possible if we first encourage students to reflect on both the good and bad within our country’s past rather than be strangled by it.
In an 1860 speech on the eve of the Civil War, American abolitionist Frederick Douglass likened the American government to a ship that was guided by the Constitution as its compass: “The one may point right and the other steer wrong.” Douglass could be proud of America’s principles while watching his government fail to steer where those principles directed.
At Thinking Nation, we want students to live in this tension. To tell an honest history, we confront past sins. But we also tell stories of resistance and resilience, of strength and solidarity, of hope. Goodness and sorrow make their way into every story.
To cultivate a reflective patriotism in future generations, we must commit to teaching history as a set of skills rather than a list of dates and events. History is a discipline (the study of the past), not a content (the past). Many of our K-12 history standards, textbooks, and courses narrowly focus on that content at the expense of teaching students the dispositions necessary for the discipline. When we only focus on the content, we often fight over whose history is better or more accurate, which only furthers our national divide. A focus on content makes us choose between 1619 and 1776; a disciplinary approach empowers us to recognize the historical significance of both.
When education leaders recognize history as a discipline shaped by investigation and interpretation, however, we can empower students to wrestle with complexity rather than avoid it. In practice, this would look like providing students with the tools of historical thinking: the agency to ask tough questions, grapple with competing narratives, and construct their own evidence-based claims about the past. State and district leaders must prioritize a comprehensive, investigative history education within an educational environment for students to contend with the complexities of the past without feeling bound to a particular narrative of America’s successes or failures.
A history education that prioritizes what needs to be learned forces us to choose between Juneteenth and Independence Day. A discipline that instructs us how we can learn more deeply about our nation’s past enables us to celebrate both.
