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 in mind that while this questioner wonders whether we’ve been captured by the political left, our response wouldn’t change if the questioner wondered whether we’ve been captured by the political right. To get a better sense for our fundamental approach to teaching history, please follow the link below to our post on “whose side we’re on,” or even this post on learning skepticism in history.

Best,

Nate

There’s probably a short and a long answer to your question. The short answer is that we are strongly opposed to indoctrination, and are worried about trends like CRT that force a single narrative on a very complicated story, often for partisan and ideological reasons that ignore the actual methods of historical research, starting with conclusions and then working backwards to prove them with selective evidence. But I would say that this cuts both ways—we’re not starting with the conclusion that America is evil and then selecting all of the evidence that proves that, but we’re also not starting with the conclusion that America is unimpeachable and then selecting all of the evidence that proves that. We’re telling a long and complicated story, and you and your child will find much to be proud of, much to scratch your head about, and probably much that will make you glad that not everything your country does and has done necessarily reflects back on you personally.

Aside from the question of ideologically motivated history, our courses also work hard to teach your child how to read closely, detect motivated reasoning, break down arguments, and otherwise be a discerning and careful reader and consumer of information. We do this in lots of ways, but most explicitly through our unit document lessons, where students get into primary and secondary sources to make original judgments about the past. We hope those are a useful fleshing-out of what the discipline of history has to offer students.

I’m happy to take more questions if you have them, but you should also feel free to take a seven day free trial and poke around a bit. If you decide to subscribe you can cancel anytime, though I hope we can earn your trust, as I’m confident that we’ve created a product that will equip your child with knowledge and skills you’ll be glad to have inculcated.

One other resource that may be worth looking at—we have a blog post on “whose side we’re on,” with a student activity, and a much longer (if somewhat more abstract) answer. It doesn’t replace getting into the course and learning what we do firsthand, but we put it out there for questions just like this, so feel free to give it a go and let us know what you think.

Hope to see you around!

Image: “The Fifteenth Amendment”, 1870 illustration of the amendment’s adoption