Why Students Have Turned Away from History

I think the reason why students take less history these days is that teaching it has largely been taken over by Leftists.  And what they teach is one long whine -- which is boring.  Patriotic history would be much more popular

I taught history from 1976 through 2013 at Harvard, Carnegie-Mellon, the Naval War College, and Williams College. The 37 years of my career coincided with a drastic change in the nature of history as it is taught in our colleges and universities. That led to an extraordinary decline in student interest in history, reflected in majors and course enrollments.

In 2019, I published my autobiography, A Life in History. At the end of the book, I presented figures on changes in undergraduate history enrollments at a number of major institutions from 1965 through 2017. Harvard and Radcliffe together had graduated about 270 history majors in 1965, with about 30 full-time history faculty. In 2017 the department had 47 full-time members and graduated 45 history majors. Columbia history majors in the same years fell from 76 to 68 even though the graduating class increased from 569 to 1135. Swarthmore history majors fell from 33 to 22 (despite a 30 percent increase in the size of the class), and Wellesley fell from 53 out of 381 seniors to 12 out of 547.

In all those institutions, the number of history faculty increased, while the total number of students they taught fell.

I believe that the main reason for the decline in history is that students don’t care for the product the faculty is offering. Most history courses are now too specialized and often politically slanted to interest them.

The roots of what has happened to history go back to the 1960s, when the Vietnam War convinced a critical mass of college students that they could safely ignore whatever the older generation said. That war was indeed a catastrophe, but that single strategic mistake did not, as so many of my contemporaries thought, discredit the entire government, society, and intellectual tradition within which it took place.

Many, however, decided that imperialism, not the defense of freedom, was the basis of American foreign policy; that universities were cogs in that imperialist machine, not sites to pursue knowledge for its own sake; and that racism was fundamental to American life, instead of an aberration our parents’ generation had been working to eliminate.

Many such young men and women went into academia and spent their lives elaborating on those themes. The nature of their new scholarship began to emerge in the 1980s.

In 1985, Theodore Draper, then probably the leading historian of American Communism, reviewed a series of new books on that topic by younger historians in the New York Review of Books. All had several things in common. The authors identified themselves proudly as veterans of the New Left of the 1960s and argued that their politics allowed them to see things about American Communism in the 1930s and 1940s that older historians had missed.

They claimed to be writing “social history,” rather than older, antiquated “political history,” and focusing on the lives, thoughts, and feelings of ordinary Communists. And they argued that the Communists they had discovered were not, as Draper and others had found, simple tools of Moscow, but rather representatives of “authentic American radicalism.”

One of the biggest problems in their work was that when one examined their sources for that last claim, one found that they didn’t really prove it—often, indeed, they seemed to confirm Moscow’s primacy.

But Draper missed two things. First, he did not realize that this new approach was becoming the mainstream approach among historians of women and minority groups, who also argued that their own identity gave them insights that white males could not have. They also said it was more important to focus on “marginalized” men and women than on the leaders of political and economic institutions. Second, while Draper noted that the authors he was critiquing were just coming up for tenure, he didn’t realize that their ideas would become totally mainstream within two decades.

In the 1970s and 1980s, when social history became fashionable, its practitioners sold it as an attempt to learn more about workers, peasants, and other less-visible social sectors that traditional political history had tended to slight. Feminists and nonwhite scholars picked up that ball and ran with it, arguing that they represented identities that white male historians had ignored, and whose voices now needed to be heard.

By the turn of the new century, even to study the political leadership of Western countries in detail had become suspect in history because it supposedly reinforced white male hegemony in society.

The long-term impact of those changes emerges when one looks at what historians do study today. The program of the last annual meeting of the American Historical Association lists 300 different panels on different historical topics. Only 15 of those 300—2.5 percent—deal with political history.

We must, however, look at those panels individually to understand what “political history” now means.

The sessions dealt with:

the funding of Sesame Street in the 1970s;

the authorship of Wikipedia articles about women’s suffrage in the US;

ideas of female monarchy in the Middle Ages;

the intellectual influence of the right after 1945 in various countries;

the recent immigrant rights movement in the US;

Fascist and Communist ideas of war during the Sino-Japanese conflict in the 1930s;

several populist episodes in recent American politics;

a panel discussion of historians and presidential misconduct;

various nonwhite feminist political movements;

a panel on the gender of power;

the politics of gun control;

women and religious liberty in early America;

a panel on writing the history of American conservatism under Donald Trump; and

human rights and state constitutions, 1796-1861.

In short, only three panels touched on major national issues in the US, and not a single one deals with a Western European political issue of any kind. None dealt with presidential leadership, the passage and impact of a major piece of legislation, or the origins, course, and results of war.

Because of this shift, we know much less about the politics and diplomacy of the last 40 years or so than we do about earlier periods. Whereas dozens of serious archival books had been written on the politics of the 1930s and 1940s by the time I was in graduate school, there are practically no serious studies of US political and diplomatic history since 1980 or so today.

Almost no one is either trained to write them or given a tenure-track job for having done so.

I had been teaching the history of warfare at the Naval War College for 16 years in 2006 when a political scientist at Williams College invited me to spend a year in a new chair in American diplomatic history that he had managed to create. I found later that when he initially floated his plans to the chair of the history department, she asked why he wanted to do that, since “that’s not what historians do anymore.”

Yet, during my year there, the courses I taught on the US and the two world wars and on Vietnam were extremely popular, and some students regretted that there were not more of them available.

As departments became larger and faculty became more specialized, the distinction between undergraduate and graduate education was lost.

Meanwhile, I saw the impact of the changes reflected in AHA programs on undergraduate curriculums. As departments became larger and faculty became more specialized, the distinction between undergraduate and graduate education was lost.

A historian of gender and sexuality in France (to select a random example that does not refer to a specific individual) offered undergraduate courses on gender and sexuality in France, without feeling any obligation to educate students about critical political events. Such courses predictably drew small enrollments, but faculty didn’t care.

At departmental lunches, I heard faculty report that their class had half a dozen students in them without a shred of embarrassment—much less any analysis of whether their contribution to teaching was earning their salary.

At one such meeting, a prominent faculty member plugged a talk by a visiting British historian about the significance of the powder puff in 1920s Britain. The talk was built around an arrest of a suspected gay man who was carrying a powder puff, and the presenter riffed on industrialization, consumerism, commodification, and transgressive sexuality.

A few days later I asked a student who had been there what he thought about it. He had more traditional historical interests, but he said that 90 percent of the history courses at Williams were of that type.

Now in retirement, I have embarked upon a new project: a political history of the United States based upon the inaugural addresses and State of the Union addresses of our presidents. I have been reminded that from Washington forward, American political leadership and the people saw themselves as conducting a great experiment in free, representative government, which might set an example for the world.

One doesn’t have to view American history uncritically or ignore our frequent failures to live up to our ideals to regard this story as a fascinating and inspiring one. Yet that is the story that most university history courses today choose to ignore, in favor of meditations that reflect the personal interests of the faculty rather than the needs or interests of the students.

That is why history and the humanities have lost the central place they occupied in our universities a half-century ago, and why they will have so much trouble regaining it.

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Will Jewish and Christian Schools Teach the Truth About America and Racism?

Dennis Prager

When I went to yeshiva day schools, America was celebrated.  America was regarded, in the description of Menachem Schneerson (the Lubavitcher rebbe), the most influential rabbi of the 20th century, as a "medina shel chesed" -- "a country of kindness."

He knew, as all American Jews knew, that there were many anti-Semites in America, that America should have done more for the Jews of Europe, that universities like Harvard limited the number of Jewish students, that prestigious law firms and country clubs barred Jews, etc. So, then, why did he describe America as a country of kindness? Why did my yeshiva in Brooklyn put on plays honoring George Washington? Why did my Orthodox Jewish day school utilize texts not only celebrating America but affirming America as a "melting pot"? Why did a Jew, Irving Berlin, write "God bless America"?

The primary reason was that these Jews knew what the rest of the world was like. They had the wisdom to compare America with other countries, not, as the foolish, nihilistic left does, to utopia. Compared with the rest of the world, America was -- and remains -- a medina shel chesed.

Was it such a country for every one of its citizens? Of course not. At the time Rabbi Schneerson described America as a "country of kindness," the southern half of America enforced immoral and degrading Jim Crow laws, and racism was common in the North as well. I have noted the anti-Semitism in American life at that time. And gays were often ostracized and degraded.

But the Torah teaches us that we are not to compare the past with the present. That is why Noah, the man God saves from the Flood, is described in Genesis as righteous "in his generations." If Noah were to be compared with people in later generations, he would be found wanting. Abraham, the man chosen by God to be the father of His People, had a concubine and lied about his wife to save his own life. But only fools -- like all those who want to tear down monuments to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson -- would dismiss Abraham's greatness. Jacob, the man God renamed "Israel," owned slaves. Should Jews cease calling themselves the "children of Israel"? Should the State of Israel change its name?

That is what Jewish -- and all religious -- schools should be teaching when discussing Washington or Jefferson having slaves. If we are to dismiss the greatness of two of the founders of the freest country in human history -- not to mention the best non-Jewish country Jews have ever lived in -- then we should do likewise to the Jewish patriarchs. Moses had a fellow Israelite executed for publicly violating the Sabbath. Should his sculpture be removed from the Supreme Court? Will Jewish day schools start dismissing the greatness of all our ancestors? If they start doing this to Washington and Jefferson, they should be consistent.

Or should they do what the Torah does? While never ignoring the flaws of giants, remember why they were giants.

Will Jewish and Christian schools -- there is no hope for wisdom in secular schools -- teach that every society in world history, including African, Native American and Arab societies, all practiced slavery? If not, why not? Isn't it morally and factually dishonest to teach only about slavery in America?

What should be taught is that America's and the Western world's uniqueness did not lie in having slaves. Slavery was universal. Therefore, the morally serious person asks who abolished slavery, not who practiced it. But the left -- as opposed to liberals and conservatives -- is not now, nor ever has been, morally serious.

When you ask the only morally significant question -- who abolished slavery? -- the answer is America and some other Western countries. And then you should teach the reason: because of Western values rooted in the Bible. One would think that fact would be central to the curriculum of every Jewish and Christian school that takes their religion seriously. But much of contemporary Christianity and Judaism -- including Jewish and Christian schools -- has been influenced more by the left than by Christianity or Judaism.

If your school cares about truth, it should try to teach all the facts while acknowledging the history of racism and including the history of police racism. One such fact is that in August 2019, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded there is "no significant evidence of antiblack disparity in the likelihood of being fatally shot by police."

A Jewish school might also wish to note that, according to a 2016 Anti-Defamation League survey, "'anti-Semitic views' among black respondents were materially more common than among whites." The Washington Post reported two years earlier, "'entrenched anti-Semitic views' are far more common among African Americans and Latinos than among others."

Indeed, in 1991, black attacks on Jews in Crown Heights, New York City, were so violent that former Mayor Ed Koch, New York Times' executive editor A.M. Rosenthal and others called it a "pogrom." Brandeis University historian Edward S. Shapiro wrote it was "the most serious anti-Semitic incident in American history." Will Jewish schools smear American society as "systemically" racist while making believe blacks are the only victims?

One reason this is important is so students will understand that "all whites are racist" is as vile a charge as "all blacks are anti-Semitic."

Finally, will Jewish and Christian schools teach the central teaching of both faiths -- that Adam had no race? As the sages put it: "Why was only a single specimen of man created first? To teach us that ... no race or class may claim a nobler ancestry, saying, 'Our father was born first.'" In other words, the Bible's demand is that we be colorblind.

"There are only two races," Viktor Frankl wrote, "the race of the decent and the race of the indecent."

No Jewish or Christian parent should send their child to a Jewish or Christian school that teaches otherwise.

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A Baker’s Dozen reasons to keep your children out of “public” schools

The Lockdown has had one very strong positive benefit – even with some negatives.  Tens of millions of parents have seen their children’s schools lock their children out.  Especially the government-run, tax-funded (GRTF) institutions.  So tens of millions of children have been locked up in these close cousins to prisons for 6-10 hours a day.  According to surveys by Home School Legal Defense Association and other groups, many parents have decided that they do NOT want to send their kids back to these places of horror.

So let us consider…

A Baker’s Dozen ™ reasons to KEEP your children OUT of the public schools (government-run, tax-funded schools) and home school them.

GRTF schools try to teach them “values” about sex, which amount to “anything goes” and the only responsibility you have is to accept that “no is no” from the other partner (or partners).

GRTF schools try to teach them values about other moral issues, like honesty and fair dealing, with the examples set by teacher’s unions, politicians on school boards, and seeing other students con and threaten teachers and classmates.

GRTF schools try to teach them values about health care and medicine, like the incredible worth and absolute necessity of vaccination and contraception and abortion, while teaching them to fear everyone will give them some disease if they do not maintain “social distancing.”

GRTF schools try to teach them values about mental health, gender, and diversity: that emotions always trump reason, logic, and facts; that you can be any gender and sex you feel like, and that diversity is only bad when it specifically includes traditional values.

GRTF schools try to teach them values of the environment, safety, and peace: that mankind is not part of the environment except as humans destroy it, that safety (again, like gender, defined by what you feel) is paramount, and peace must take priority over freedom (and human rights).

GRTF schools present their teachers and other staff as role models, even while they tell their teachers and staff to shut up about things like race and religion and morality.

GRTF schools try to replace the children’s parents with other authority figures, including teachers, administrators, politicians, and perverts.

GRTF schools try to get children to treat the State like God, even to the point of worship – but only as long as the State (government) implements their so-called liberal (“progressive”) ideas and values.

GRTF schools hold up immoral and ineffective people as role models, especially those who fit into a very few favored groups – like homosexuals, feminists, and left-wing dictators.

GRTF schools trash moral, courageous and successful people, claiming that they can’t be role models because they must be considered in light of 21st Century “standards” (as defined by “progressives”) and not their own times.

GRTF schools will not try to teach children to be smart, sharp, independent, strong, free, responsible, or different from other children in any important way, because then they would question (the right kind of) authority figures and not submit to the State and their betters.

GRTF schools will try to teach children to be “creative” in ways that are destructive to themselves, others, and traditional society and values, as well as property and health and life (both public and private).

GRTF schools have demonstrated for more than a half-century that they are incapable of doing any of the things that they are theoretically doing – teaching children basic life skills and knowledge about the world around them. At the same time, the GRTF school beg for more and more money to try again and again.

GRTF schools seek to replace the family and religion and the role of parents in every possible way with the dictat of government and “professionals” – those who have degrees in “education” and “child-rearing” and child psychology and all the rest, but whom never had a single child for which they were truly responsible, or any practical experience.

The result is the world we see around us, where relatively minor illnesses are presented as neo-biblical plagues, where people protest and riot and loot to demonstrate that “black lives matter” while destroying the businesses and lives of people of color and destroy the very services on which those people depend.

Parents, count your blessings that your children were not forced to be in school for 500 to 700 hours in 2020.  If you feel that you cannot teach them yourselves, visit your local churches or businesses or civic groups, who will gladly find someone for you to partner with in teaching your young girls and boys. But keep them free from the horrors of GRTF schools.

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