Lately, as is well known, the teaching of history has become—not for the first time—a terrain of conflict in the ongoing culture wars. Numerous states have enacted laws or regulations banning the teaching of “divisive concepts,” with the histories of slavery and racism at the top of the list. Charges—almost entirely imaginary—proliferate that teachers are seeking to make white students feel guilty for our racial past and indoctrinate the young with critical race theory, an obscure methodology mostly encountered in law schools and graduate departments. In some states teachers are breaking the law if they talk seriously about racism. It is easy to scoff at these measures, which require (in the words of a North Dakota statute) that the teaching of history be “factual and objective” while at the same time forbidding mention of the idea that racism is “systemically embedded in American society.” But they pose a serious threat to academic freedom. Nietzsche once distinguished between three kinds of history—antiquarian (works of genealogy), monumental (glorification of the nation-state), and critical (history that “judges and condemns”). There have always been those who wish to impose the monumental approach on the nation’s classrooms.

Perhaps an equally significant problem with history education today is that there is simply not enough of it. In the past two decades, state after state, spurred by the growing emphasis on STEM subjects and the No Child Left Behind policy of linking school funding to test scores in English and mathematics, has significantly reduced how much history is taught at all levels of public education.

Ideas have consequences. Neither the historical profession nor the publishing industry has fully acknowledged its decades-long complicity in disseminating the poisonous idea that Black Americans are unfit for participation in American democracy. Meanwhile, people are still teaching history, and many are teaching it well.

-Eric Foner in the 9/22 issue of The New York Review of Books