Opinion | On Trump’s ‘patriotic education’

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Written by the faculty of Chapman University’s History Department within the Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences

On Sept. 17 President Donald Trump launched an attack on Nikole Hannah-Jones’ Pulitzer Prize-winning “1619 Project,” stating that her focus on slavery’s importance in American history threatened “patriotic education.” Shortly after, he announced a fundraising effort of $5 billion so that “we can educate people as to the real history of our country.” 

We are the faculty in Chapman’s History Department, and this is our response.

Chapman University’s mission is to educate global citizens who will lead ethical and productive lives dedicated to inquiry. History is an old discipline that aims to produce critical thinkers. By exploring the messy, complicated and often contradictory nature of society, culture, politics, religion and thought in the past, and through asking fundamental questions about how people lived their lives and why they made the decisions they did, history teaches us to think deeply about the present.

The cliche about the need to study history to avoid making the same mistakes as the past bears the following: we study history to learn how to ask meaningful questions about the past so we can ask important questions about the present. The study of history is therefore political. The ability to ask questions about the nature of power and the status quo – and especially a public education system that embodies these values – scares some people. For example, some politicians have opposed K-12 critical thinking skills because these allegedly threaten to undermine parental authority. It seems that Trump similarly worries about learning to ask critical questions about the nation’s past. 

He opposes the 1619 Project because he argues it “rewrites American history to teach our children that we were founded on the principles of oppression, not freedom.” Trump said he would establish a new “1776 Commission” for “patriotic education” to ensure that, "our youth will be taught to love America," and “to know that they are the citizens of the most exceptional nation in the history of the world.”

Trump has often demonstrated that he is not well-schooled in history, and he fails to realize that “patriotic education” campaigns are hallmarks of other authoritarian regimes and detrimental to free, democratic societies. In Japan during World War II, for example, the book “Kokutai no Hongi” (Cardinal Principles of the National Body) was required curriculum as the nation mobilized the entire population to fight a “Holy War” first with China and then the U.S. in the Pacific Ocean. This text stressed patriotism and loyalty to, and self-sacrifice for, the emperor as fundamental Japanese values dating back to time immemorial. 

The ease with which Japanese soldiers victimized people across the China and Southeast Asia theaters was due in part to nationalistic education that stressed Japan’s uniqueness and its divine mission to control Asia. And we can find similar examples of indoctrination practiced by authoritarian regimes, including Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. 

Historical knowledge is produced through discussion and debate. Patriotic education is not about debate, discussion or compromise (what the Founding Fathers actually instituted as the bedrock of America’s political process). Patriotic education is about obedience, and nothing more. True patriotism comes from the freedom to openly discuss and debate the most fundamental aspects of the nation. Those that are afraid of thinking about the context in which the Founding Fathers acted don’t really care about what they thought, wrote or implemented. They are concerned with a politically convenient narrative that supports their preconceived notions of the way things should be at any given political moment.

Despite what Trump has assuaged, what historians in America do does not subtract from our heritage, but adds to it. We are not dropping any subjects, but instead adding new ones constantly, uncovering the richness of our story, discovering wonderful and overlooked people and events that were part of our heritage. And yes, in some cases we discuss the difficult and sometimes dark histories that make this nation what it is today. Is that not the greatest patriotism of all, searching for the fullest understanding of our nation?