When Corrective Becomes Orthodoxy

I just attended Ohio’s Council for the Social Studies annual conference. It was a great experience. One thing I saw during a session directly touches on something Lexandria is trying to avoid as we bring high-quality educational content to teachers.

A professor was promoting the Zinn Education Project, which challenges conventional approaches to teaching American history. One handout, "Founding" Documents We Don't Learn About, collected primary sources meant to complicate the traditional story of the Founding.

I was glad to see among them Phillis Wheatley's 1774 letter to Samson Occum. Wheatley, an African-born poet who was once enslaved in Boston, indicted colonists who demanded liberty from Britain while denying it to enslaved Africans. It is a wonderful source for teaching the history of natural rights language in the Revolutionary period.

It’s good the Zinn Education Project included Wheatley’s voice. But its introduction to Wheatley’s letter was simply wrong. It asserted that Thomas Jefferson “pushed false claims of Black inferiority in order to delay emancipation.”

Jefferson did engage with then-popular ideas about racial differences, and those racist ideas deserve to be refuted. However, the Zinn Education Project committed intellectual malpractice. It took a few facts and then, without acknowledging it, leaped to an unsupported accusation. Naming Jefferson’s purpose requires evidence of his intentions, not an inference from the effects of his arguments.

What the introduction left out was striking. Jefferson was not ignorant of the conflict between his racist views and his belief in natural rights. In fact, he attempted to reconcile them throughout his career. Although he defended racist distinctions, he also wrote arguing that human differences in ability (in this case, explicitly referring to his belief in racial differences) would not justify rejecting universal human rights.

The Zinn introduction also said nothing of Wheatley's admiration for George Washington, her support for the American cause, or her later celebration of independence.

The problem wasn't that the handout brought up Jefferson’s racism, which was real and wrong. The problem was that students were told what to think about the document and its context before getting a chance to take it on its own terms. Teachers and students alike were given a conclusion before they had the facts.

Howard Zinn’s work was meant to correct the “orthodoxy” of unquestioning patriotic narratives, but the work that bears his name peddles unquestioned, unsupported narratives itself. When a corrective becomes influential enough, it becomes its own orthodoxy.

The Problem with Orthodoxy

For much of American history, schoolchildren learned a Founding story built around the courage of the revolutionary generation, the wisdom of the Constitution, and the nation's steady realization of its ideals.

That story contained plenty of truth. There was also plenty missing: slavery, the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, the exclusion of women, the contributions of ordinary people. Correcting those omissions is part of teaching history well.

But we should be precise about what made the older approach inadequate. It wasn't that a teacher admired real American achievements. It was that students were told what to conclude before they investigated the evidence.

The heroes were chosen in advance. The moral was settled. Events and documents were used to illustrate the narrative, not as facts to learn from and grapple with.

The same failure happens when the heroes become villains. We can organize the Founding around the Founders' wisdom and neglect the people they excluded. Or we can organize it around their areas of hypocrisy and neglect the real changes their ideas and institutions helped produce.

Both can teach real facts and still leave students with a distorted picture. Every curriculum leaves things out. But selecting evidence for teaching is different from selecting it to guarantee a conclusion. The danger isn't that teachers have convictions. The danger is that their convictions become the conclusions students are expected to "discover."

Howard Zinn and History Against the Grain

Zinn seemed to understand this problem, at least in traditional history. His bestseller, A People's History of the United States, challenged an approach that treated the past as the achievements of presidents, generals, and legislators. Zinn asked readers to look instead at enslaved people, industrial workers, Indigenous communities, women, and dissidents.

That was a useful challenge in some ways. Ordinary Americans matter to American history, and it is valuable to elevate the stories of Americans who suffered from the Declaration’s promise being left incomplete. But Zinn went further. His memoir's title, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train, captures his view that history is never morally neutral.

Part of that is true. What we teach, the questions we ask, and the people we call significant all reflect judgments. Silence can have consequences. A teacher discussing slavery should be able to say it was wrong.

But there is a difference between acknowledging that historians have moral commitments and insisting that historical inquiry serve a predetermined moral or political purpose. The first is unavoidable. The second is dangerous.

In his essay "Undue Certainty," historian Sam Wineburg argues that Zinn's work, for all its differences from conventional textbooks, can share their central weakness. It uses evidence to support conclusions already reached, rather than to open questions.

Students get a different interpretation, but their role is the same: absorb it. Challenging an orthodoxy doesn't automatically make the replacement more accurate. Once a mission matters more than its method, a historian gets very good at finding evidence that supports a preferred interpretation, and much less willing to see evidence that complicates it.

What Phillis Wheatley Actually Thought

In 1774, Wheatley wrote to Samson Occum, a Mohegan minister, supporting his defense of the natural rights of enslaved Africans. She had only recently gained her own freedom.

She argued that the love of freedom is common to all people:

"In every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom."

She compared enslaved Africans to the Israelites in Egypt. She condemned Americans whose cry for liberty contradicted their treatment of others. The Zinn Education Project reduces Wheatley to a resister of the Revolution, someone who was principally interested in challenging the “patriot enslavers,” as they put it. But Wheatley also supported the Revolution.

She wrote a poem honoring George Washington, who praised her talent and invited her to visit him. In 1784, after the war, she published Liberty and Peace, celebrating American independence.

How could someone who saw so clearly the hypocrisy of slaveholding revolutionaries also celebrate their cause? The Zinn Education Project doesn’t give her a chance to praise the Revolution because it uses her as a bludgeon against Thomas Jefferson. It flattens Wheatley’s character into a caricature.

Perhaps she saw in the Revolution a chance to advance principles its leaders hadn't yet lived up to. Perhaps she understood that their hypocrisy didn't invalidate their claims about human liberty. Wheatley resists labeling the Revolution as either a triumph of liberty or a project of oppression. She could condemn the Founders' contradictions while embracing their aspirations.

She wasn't alone in living with those contradictions. In 1780, Pennsylvania passed a gradual abolition law that tied the struggle for American liberty to the obligation to free enslaved people. Seven years later, delegates at the Constitutional Convention argued over slavery. Some condemned it on moral grounds. Others defended it or protected the interests that depended on it.

The same generation that helped end slavery in parts of the new nation accommodated its survival and expansion elsewhere. Those aren't incidental details. They are central to understanding what the Revolution was, what it achieved, and where it failed.

A patriotic narrative that ignores slavery fails the record. So does one that treats the Revolution as nothing but hypocrisy. You may be more comfortable with one of these stories. Comfort should not be our standard for deciding what students learn.

You Can't Be Neutral — But You Can Be Wrong

Zinn's metaphor deserves to be taken seriously. He's right that we can't step outside history to avoid hard moral judgments. If the train is moving, declining to take a position doesn't stop it. Yet the idea that the train is moving tells us very little about what to do.

Where is it going? Toward danger, or toward somewhere people urgently need to be? Is the speed the risk, or is the risk that it won't arrive in time? Stop it, slow it, switch tracks?

A train headed for a collapsed bridge should be stopped. But stopping a train on the assumption that the bridge has collapsed, without checking, has its own costs. Equally, if we have good reason to fear disaster, hesitation may cost more than action. Moral urgency can't substitute for understanding the circumstances.

C. S. Lewis made a related point in Mere Christianity: progress means moving in the right direction, and if we've taken a wrong turn, the most progressive thing to do may be to turn around.

How do we know we've taken the wrong road?

That's where historical inquiry becomes indispensable. We need evidence: the choices people made, the circumstances they faced, the alternatives available, the consequences that followed. We also need to acknowledge the limits of what we know.

One of the most dangerous habits in history education is becoming so certain of the destination that we stop watching the road.

A historian who has decided America is a story of inevitable progress may struggle to see injustice except as a brief speed bump. One who has decided it is a story of unchanging oppression may struggle to see improvement except as a facade. In both cases, the desired conclusion dictates the treatment of the evidence.

The more morally urgent we feel about our conclusions, the more tempting it is to wave away contrary evidence as a distraction. Yet the importance of our convictions should make us more careful with evidence, not less.

What Should We Be Teaching Instead?

None of this requires pretending history has no moral dimension. Slavery was wrong, and it was far from the only injustice committed in America’s past. Saying so openly doesn't weaken those judgments. Nor does intellectual independence mean every interpretation deserves equal respect. Some are better supported than others. Some claims are simply false.

The point of historical inquiry isn't to avoid conclusions. It's to make sure our conclusions are justified. Here is where history education can do something more valuable than offering a better account of the past. We can teach students to evaluate competing accounts for themselves.

Compare two approaches. In the first, students get Wheatley's letter with a paragraph explaining what it proves about the Founding's hypocrisy. In the second, students read the letter alongside her other writings about the Revolution.

The first hands them a conclusion, then evidence for it. The second hands them a problem. What did Wheatley believe about liberty? How did she understand the Revolution? What does her experience tell us about the Founding generation and the people who lived through its contradictions?

Students may reach different conclusions. They should be able to defend them with evidence. This isn't just a better way to teach the Revolution. It's preparation for life. Students will meet politicians, journalists, and scholars with strong opinions about what the world is and how it should change. Some will be right, some wrong, and many will have real insights alongside serious blind spots.

Knowing which authorities to trust, or which conclusions are fashionable, won't be enough. They'll need habits of inquiry. For teachers, I'd keep one question close at hand:

What evidence would change my interpretation?

It's uncomfortable to center that question because it asks us to consider that our understanding may be incomplete or mistaken. That is the essence of serious intellectual work. If no possible evidence could change our minds, we're no longer doing inquiry. We're defending an orthodoxy.

Teachers can never be perfectly objective, but that's no reason to abandon objectivity as an aspiration. We know our biases exist. The answer is to build methods that correct for them: primary sources, corroboration, context, competing explanations, and room for students to challenge our readings.

History’s Responsibility

I left the conference thinking a lot about that Wheatley handout. I attended great sessions and made great contacts, but that handout was what I kept chewing on during my trip home.

Not because criticizing Thomas Jefferson is out of bounds. (I suspect he would have severely critical thoughts about himself if we could bring him to the modern era.) Wheatley deserves more recognition, too.

I was bothered because a resource meant to challenge an inherited narrative seemed to be building another one that these teachers were expected to accept and unquestioningly pass down to their students. The history of the Founding, and of the United States more broadly, is more interesting than either a celebration of unblemished heroes or an account of unrelenting hypocrisy.

We should be willing to challenge traditional interpretations, including the ones we find attractive. And we should be just as willing to challenge the interpretations that replace them. The goal isn't to swap an inherited orthodoxy for a better one. It's to give students the habits to question orthodoxies, including the ones their teachers favor.