Presidential Power: With Obama in the Oval Office, It's Time to Rethink How We Teach History

Even as President Obama’s first major initiative, his stimulus plan, fights its way through Congress, I can see at least three ways in which his administration will influence how we teach history in our schools. The most obvious way, of course, is that the election of our nation’s first black president changes the story of race in America. It will be interesting to see how we reconcile Obama’s victory with the story of racism we have begun to include in our history books. As I have said before, we need to square his achievement (and that of the American people in electing him) with the fact that half of our African-American kids don’t graduate from high school—a sign as indicative of a racially dysfunctional society as his election is of a society in which the place of race is changing.

The second way Obama’s election will affect the teaching of history is not about him at all, but rather about books. The President has spoken of his commitment to spending billions on infrastructure, including computers in school libraries and universal broadband access. Assuming that this plan is carried out relatively quickly and effectively, the question of where books fit into K–12 education’s digital world will be a key issue for the next decade.

Every school library that’s endowed with plenty of terminals and high-speed Internet connections needs to determine which books are essential to its mission and how to blend the gravity of print with the ever-expanding universe of Web sites. I believe this marriage can be a very happy one. Teachers must learn to use the Internet for exploration and research and continue to use print as a model to encourage their students to think and write critically. Authors need to take advantage of technology by using digital conferencing to make themselves and their research available to students. Books and the totally wired school system can enhance each other, as long as authors, editors, publishers, teachers, librarians, and educational technologists recognize the challenge and work together. Obama’s education agenda means we must begin this conversation at once.

The third way the new administration relates to the teaching of history can be found in the many references that have been made to the New Deal and the Great Depression. Today, we speak about the 1930s because we’re in a recession. But I think that’s only part of the reason the past keeps cropping up in our daily conversations.

Historians, as my doctoral adviser once said, are like tribal elders: we pass on the knowledge, experiences, and myths that give meaning and direction to young people. But from the fall of Communism to the bursting of the dot-com bubble to the global boom of the early 21st century, it’s been easy to dismiss the past as irrelevant. According to many pundits, we have reached the end of history, books, and old ways of making money. Forget the past, we are told, meaning is derived from the present and future—from the next invention, the next new technology, the next iteration of the Web, the next clever new financial instrument. As for the role of elders in our society, there’s no room for them in this shortsighted scheme of things: they’re merely old, unable to keep up with the rapidly changing present, incapable of envisioning the dazzling future.

The crash of a world economy built on complicated hedging and the fall of a national economy built, in part, on the eagerness of Americans to buy new cars laden with computer gadgets have revealed the weakness of that way of thinking. Given our current economic predicament, the present is suddenly less delicious, the future less fascinating, and the past more important. Only now do we realize that history—with its knowledge of others who have risen and fallen—truly matters.

Barack Obama comes to office with a sense of history and a determination to change it. His arrival makes history once again important to us—and thus challenges us to find better ways to share, discuss, explore, and teach the past to our children.