How divisive are the “divisive concepts” supposedly being taught in the nation’s schools? If you were to take the media’s word for it, you’d probably answer “very.” This summer and fall, some local and national news outlets have published stories showing concerned citizens with conservative tendencies voicing—even screaming—their vehement disapproval of the teaching of uncomfortable histories in the classroom. Such media coverage harmonizes well with a broader narrative that our country is hopelessly divided along partisan lines. That narrative is reified by dozens of state legislatures proposing (and some passing) laws against the presentation of supposedly distressing educational subject matter, all lumped under the false banner of “critical race theory.”
But here’s the thing: We’re not actually much divided on this issue! Having recently teamed up with the American Historical Association, secured funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and conducted a survey of the country’s views on and experiences with history (the first such poll carried out since the mid-1990s), I have the data to back up that claim. One key poll item from our survey, administered in the fall of 2020, asked respondents whether it’s acceptable to teach about the harm some people have done to others, even if that subject matter causes learners discomfort. Given all the airtime and column space devoted to the controversies of such curricula, one would expect to find sharp divisions in the responses.
That didn’t happen. On the contrary, our 1,816 respondents, who replied to roughly 40 questions about the nature of history, history education, and the historical media they favor, supported teaching these types of discomfiting issues by an overwhelming 54-point margin, with 77 percent in favor, and just 23 percent opposed. Those affirmative results largely held for every cross tabulation as well, whether by age, gender, race/ethnicity, region of the country, or education. Even the party affiliation crosstab failed to produce meaningful disparity: 78 percent of self-identified Democrats voiced support for the teaching of painful history, which was only a little more than their Republican peers’ 74 percent. There are plenty of things we Americans worry about when it comes to our children’s education, but according to our survey results, “divisive concepts” is not one of them.
Nor is the related issue of revisionist history, likewise a bugaboo of those insisting that only a Single and Unalterable Truth be taught to our nation’s schoolchildren, as controversial as you might assume. Questioned about whether our knowledge of the past should change over time, nearly two-thirds in our survey agreed that it should. That is, a decisive majority of respondents agreed with the premise that we modify and adapt the stories we tell about the past—something that professional historians do all the time.