I wake up. First thing I do: I look at my phone, and click on Radio Jornalera, the online workers’ radio station of Resistencia en Accion. Que pasa? What’s going on? ICE is once again in Trenton, masked and armed, as they’ve been every other day recently. But Resistencia’s Rapid Response team is there, too, demanding that ICE identify themselves, filming them, and taking down their license plates and badge numbers.

It reminds me of life in the West Bank, but also of tenth grade American history: the Hessians are back in Trenton, partying like it’s Christmas Day, 1776. Too bad there’s no revolutionary army to confront them, and no Emmanuel Leutze to paint the scene. But there are a bunch of unarmed twenty-first century Minutemen–basically a Massachusetts phenomenon but with Jersey equivalents–led paradoxically enough by a diminutive activist named Asma Elhuni, a Libyan immigrant from Vermont. Chalk it up to the ironies of history, but this time around, the Minutemen are led by a minute woman.

Asma Elhuni, Minutewoman

Sad that the word “Minuteman” more easily calls to mind the image of an intercontinental ballistic missile with multiple re-entry nuclear warheads than an anti-imperial militia, ready to fight absolute monarchy at a minute’s notice. Leave it to our ruling class to conflate the two, to embed the conflation in our minds, and to do so by design. But then, leave it to them to send the Hessians back to Trenton to protect “the land of the free.”

For as long as I can remember, people have bitched and moaned about the historical ignorance of the young. I worked for years on the NAEP US History and Civics Assessments, and taught a bit of college-level history as well. The reason for the kids’ ignorance is rather obvious. History is a difficult subject, and like any difficult subject, you can’t learn it unless you’re motivated to do so. But it’s taught in such a way as to destroy the most obvious motivation from the outset. You can’t effectively teach history to the young if you’re desperately afraid that they might grasp its meaning first-hand, and apply its lessons to the present. But that’s precisely the fear that dominates the average school board, the average parent, the average authority figure, and so, the average school itself. Gripped by it, schools feed their students a diet of irrelevant morality tales and stale hagiography. Then people wonder why kids tune out. Who wouldn’t?

There was (and is) a division at NCES, the parent organization of NAEP, designed to respond to ideological complaints about the assessment itself.* Every complaint was essentially a variation on the same theme: some item in the assessment offended someone on political grounds–too this, too that, blah blah blah. The majority of these complaints were right-wing in provenance and content, all variations on the theme that the assessment was too woke. I worked at NAEP between 1997 and 2005, so you can see how ancient these fixations really are, but obviously, they precede my employment there.

Emmanuel Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851). (Metropolitan Museum of Art, photo: Wikipedia)

I encourage you to go back as far as you like and peruse NAEP’s website, which I used to edit (follow the links above). In particular, look at past iterations of the US History and Civics Assessments, and try to articulate the evidential basis of the claim that any given assessment or any combination of them was too woke. How exactly was the 1994 US History assessment too woke? Or the one in 2001? Or 2006, or 2010, or 2014? A sensible person will, I think, inevitably reach an irresistible, data-driven conclusion: they weren’t. Yet the accusations of wokeness were made across all of those decades; the lexicon of accusation has changed, not the accusations themselves. The complainants haven’t stopped, and won’t, until NAEP is hounded out of existence, which is what the Trump Administration is trying its best to do. It can’t be woke, I guess, if it’s dead–though with this crew, you never know.

NAEP’s assessment items were vetted in a comprehensive, in fact, semi-paranoid, way, desperately designed to avoid accusations, litigation, and friction. Only fully vetted, fully accurate, consensus-safe items ever made the cut, and did so after negotiations that made the Oslo Accords seem like a walk in the park. Every conceivable (and many inconceivable) objections were discussed and occasionally given veto power for fear that someone might be offended by something. Yes, most of the front line staff were liberal Democrats (besides me, the token Republican), but their higher-ups in NAEP’s governing board (NAGB) included conservative Republicans, followed by a reactionary or two or three or ten. Congress ultimately held the purse strings, and any given presidential administration (which included a Nixon, a Ford, and a Reagan followed by two Bushes and a Trump) controlled the Department of Education. How woke did you think it could be?

South Mountain Reservation, South Orange, New Jersey; signal line and lookout for the Revolutionary Army, overlooking Springfield, site of the last Revolutionary war battle in the North (June 23, 1780)

I’m reminded of the couple of weeks I spent as a scoring supervisor in Iowa City back in 1999, scoring items in a big warehouse there for the U.S. History assessment. My team leader, the guy just under me on my scoring team, walked into work wearing a “Quantrill” T-shirt. “You’re a fan?” I asked. “Yeah,” he said, candidly, then grinned. “I’m just happy to meet someone from out East who knows who Quantrill is.” Was, I thought. Was. You could hardly have hoped for a better example of Faulkner’s dictum that the past is neither dead nor past, even when you dearly wish it was both. Would I be comfortable entrusting my kids to Quantrill-Boy’s tutelage? I don’t have kids, but I think I would if I did, not because I have any sympathy for Quantrill, but because I prefer a history teacher who grins at the mention of his favorite subject to one who’s afraid of the subject altogether. Even a crazy Confederate fan-boy beats a coward.

So let me give you some unsolicited advice. If you want kids to learn history, then brush back the non-practitioner ideological busybodies policing the classroom–“brush back” means throw a baseball at their heads–and tell them to shut their mouths for a change. Stop worrying so much whether a given teacher is “too political,” or whether there’s some attenuated danger of “indoctrination” if she brings “her own views” into the classroom. Stop worrying, in particular, if you yourself have been indoctrinated into using the word “indoctrination” without being able to define it.

Give classroom instructors the lattitude to do their own thing, voice their own opinions, make their own mistakes, but also describe what they’re doing with candor in a spirit of rational justification. Stop pretending that the study of history is some idle antiquarian pastime or hagiographic salve for the wounds of the present. Face the fact that things around us suck, but have often sucked, and that finding one’s way out of a jam is a stronger incentive to real learning than getting an impressive score on some gatekeeper’s exam, or instilling pride in a “nation” whose claims to deserve it ought to be an interrogative matter rather than a declarative one.

If you do, you’ll find that history comes alive, because it is alive. It comes alive because it’s currently being enacted by the living. The wars and revolutions and achievements of the past speak to us because they exemplify in the past tense what we live in the present and imagine for the future.

If it mortifies you to think of the activists of the present in the same breath as the “heroes” of the past, I’d say you understand neither. The Minutemen of the eighteenth century and the Rapid Responders of the present were and are members of the same species, moral agents of the same make, thrown into the same predicament, motivated in the same way by the same thing. They knew that we were meant to be free, recognized a threat to freedom for what it was, and knew that it had to be fought until it ceased to be the threat it is. The young are ignorant of history because they’ve been kept ignorant of it by people afraid of this insight. The best of the younger generation will gladly learn history once they find a rationale for it, which requires finding a way to bypass the cowardice of so many of their elders, people more afraid of history than in love with it.

It’s a cowardice many of the young might discern, first by comparing what they see in those elders, and then by looking without false modesty at what they find in themselves. The corollary of the imperative to know thyself, after all, is the imperative to know those around you. A further corollary is not to flinch at what you see, but with the lessons of history in mind, to steel yourself for what comes next. It won’t be pretty. It never was.

*I’ve tweaked this sentence to make it more precise. A previous version located the division within NAEP itself.