We received the following question this week from someone considering our courses for her son. As it’s an excellent (and recurring) question, we’re glad to have received her permission to share it here: 

We’re excited to have found your courses as we head into home educating our son for high school. We’re trying to be as intentional as possible in pulling together dynamic resources while building a college prep transcript. One of the elements, especially with choosing a wholistic U.S. history course, is selecting a program that has the intention of approaching it from an anti-racist lens. For lack of a better term, a white washed history isn’t one we’re interested in perpetuating and passing along to our son. Any information you can share about how your program is different than traditional U.S. and World History courses in this regard is greatly appreciated.

Julie from Massachussetts

Nate Noorlander’s reply on behalf of The Nomadic Professor:

Hi Julie,

The way we see it traditional U.S. History instruction can fall short in one of a few ways:

1. It’s too informational—too much focus on the bare information and not enough focus on sense-making, argumentation, gray areas, strong and weak evidence, and teaching students to think, research, and write with nuance and subtlety

2. It’s very American exceptionalist—it focuses on a particular narrative about America’s unique role in the world, its success stories, its achievements, its great men, its destiny, its shining example status and influence, and so on, with little to no focus on the compromises, the shortcuts, the tolerated costs, the abuses, the self-interested thinking, the propaganda, the rhetoric vs. reality, the deception, the secrets, and the politicized and mythical narratives

3. It’s unqualifiedly anti-American—it focuses on a particular narrative about America’s unique role in the world, its compromises, shortcuts, tolerated costs, abuses, oppression, self-interested thinking, propaganda, rhetoric vs. reality, deception, secrets, and politicized mythical narratives, with little to no focus on its success stories, its achievements, its great individuals, and its role and influence that have had a positive impact domestically and internationally

4. It’s very presentist—it reads contemporary sensibilities and values into the past with little to no regard for the actual lived realities of past people with different sensibilities, norms, values, contexts, reference points, tools and technologies, leaders, global trends, and historical precedents; a given teacher will imbue their instruction with the moral sensibility and ahistorical judgments of their own narrow slice of the population and call that “history” instead of politics

We have no magic formula for absolutely avoiding our own biases, but these are the shortcomings we’re trying to push back against. We try to be transparent and comprehensive, and pull no punches with regard to events that contradict the thrust of American exceptionalism or anti-Americanism. We try to emphasize skill-building, learning to think in terms of strong and weak arguments (rather than the more black/white thinking of “true” vs. “false” when we’re talking about complicated historical claims), and we try to build foundational skills for being historically literate, skills like sourcing, contextualizing, reading between the lines, and corroborating. Students will get a good balance of historical instruction, document study, and personal research.

I don’t want to go on for too long, so I’ll stop, but I hope this gives you a sense of where we’re coming from. Our World courses, which will start being released in January, are being built with similar foundational goals in mind. I’m happy to answer further questions if you want to explore any part of this further.

Cheers,

Nate Noorlander