The NP’s Answer: I once debated the Chinese ambassador to the U.S. on this topic. The very first (and really only) thing he brought up: the marriage of a Tang princess to Songtsen Gampo, the king of Tibet, way back in the 600s. A pretty tenuous basis for claim to a country the size of Western Europe! But this claim is pushed constantly. When I was in Lhasa in 2017 (before I was banned for…

I was once in a faculty meeting to decide on a coherent school smartphone policy. We were in the drama room on the stage of a kind of amphitheater, sixty of us sitting across from each other in a large circle. You could tell the teachers apart by the way they dressed and who they sat with—the buttoned-up science guys, the loungy PE teachers, the coffee-from-a-jar humanities group. The conversation wasn’t easy because the facilitator…

In a very real way, yes. I think it’s important, though, that we understand that the French Revolution was about a lot more than toppling monarchy. For the modern state, in my opinion, nationalism is absolutely necessary. The French Revolution (and then Napoleon) demonstrated nationalism’s tremendous mobilization power. Thus the political class is constantly collectivizing (nationalism is simply one form of ideological collectivization), striving to create a sense of nationhood, to create a mega-tribe. Anthems, pledges,…

A famous study from 1999 by Lawrence M. Rudner surveyed nearly 21,000 homeschooled students and found that their median test scores were typically in the 70th to 80th percentiles, and that 25% of homeschooled students were enrolled in a grade level that was higher than their public school counterparts. This study was widely cited by homeschool advocacy groups at the time (and still is—see Facebook, Jenny, Mason, and Thomas for examples), including the Homeschool Legal…

We regularly get questions about the slant of our history courses; these questions often boil down to a similar fundamental concern: How far have our courses been captured by one side or the other in the American culture wars? Do we have a partisan approach that unjustly celebrates, or, conversely, unjustly denigrates the “American story”? We recently got this question in a pointed way that we thought might be worth sharing more broadly. Please bear…