History Teachers, Critical Thinking, and the Culture Wars

At a time when vitriolic partisan rhetoric dominates our headlines and headspace, the AHA's Nicholas Kryczka, Whitney E. Barringer, and Scot McFarlane, thankfully, seek to find out what teachers of history and social studies are really trying to accomplish in their classrooms.They argue that "culture warriors had imposed an analytical framework that obscured the real dynamics of curricular governance in the United States." Relying on polls and interviews, they conclude that most teachers are not culture warriors but instead are trying to teach history "impartially" to prepare apathetic students for "critical thinking and informed citizenship." Indeed, "97 percent of surveyed teachers cited critical thinking as among their top learning goals." 1 American Lesson Plan, the full AHA report on which Kryczka, Barringer, and McFarlane's conclusions are based, argues that the majority of history teachers purposefully avoid biased and partisan sources as unreliable and controversial. 2 The AHA's findings echo those of a 2021 Heritage Foundation poll that found that although teachers are to the left of the average conservative, they are more moderate than the average liberal, including on issues of race.The Heritage poll's authors concluded that "the results of this survey do not support the idea that K-12 teachers are radical activists." 3 Taken together, the AHA and Heritage reports suggest that teachers-like so many Americans-are more often running interference than embracing the culture wars.Why, then, do the culture wars loom so large?With the loss of earlier forms of cultural solidarity, Americans today struggle to find common ground and are therefore 1

Critical thinking · Epistemology · Mathematics education · Pedagogy · Social science · Sociology · Educator Training and Historical Pedagogy · Global Education and Multiculturalism · Philosophy · Psychology