Why It’s Impossible To Teach History Only Using ‘The Facts’

What teachers choose to cover (or not cover) during their limited classroom time will reveal what biases and agendas that educator has on American history.

“Ladies and gentlemen: The story you are about to see is true,” declared the introduction to the classic television program “Dragnet.” “All we want are the facts, ma’am,” asserted police officer “Joe Friday” during his investigations. True stories; just the facts: it seems so straightforward, doesn’t it? Not when American social studies curricula are concerned.

“I teach my students that [Thomas] Jefferson sat there and wrote ‘all men are created equal,’ but he made his money off plantations,” said Jocelyn Foshay, a middle school social studies teacher in Dallas, according to a recent Washington Post article.  “I give the students the facts and let them draw their own conclusions,” she said. “That’s what learning is.” The Post loved Foshay’s line so much, they featured it again in a June 6 editorial, claiming she was “articulating a core principle of pedagogy that should be animating the debate about how history is taught.”

Advocates of incorporating critical race theory into curricula argue they are on the side of truth, facts, and history. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s grade-school curriculum is explicitly called “Teaching Hard History,” the implication being that some history, if difficult to learn about, is the hard, cold truth.

“History is not rainbows and unicorns,” Foshay told the WaPo. “But you can look at the twisted and the cruel and still take pride in how far the country has come.” Conservative efforts to reject the 1619 Project’s curriculum, in turn, are labeled “misguided” attempts to keep true history from America’s youth.

There are at least two problems here. The first is simply that much of the history offered by the 1619 Project and similar critical race theory initiatives is simply wrong. The second is that what teachers choose to cover with their limited time with students will reveal what biases and agendas that educator has related to history.