Whatever Happened to History?
A generation raised without a coherent sense of history will lack the tools necessary to understand the present, let alone prepare for the future.
It begins, as all regrettable stories do, with a sort of purposeful entropy, a system designed for decay. The teaching of history in American high schools—if one can still, without irony, call it such—is a deconstruction, a strip-mined expanse of ideological interjections masquerading as insight. The raw stuff of history—great men and tyrants, disasters and triumphs, the clanging of swords, the ink upon treaties, the endlessly surprising dynamo of human civilization—has been rendered into Social Studies, a neutered phrase suggestive of an eighth-grade workbook replete with smiling cartoon figures engaged in civic compromise.
What happened? The simplest answer is the abdication of rigor. Western civilization, once the lodestar of historical education, has been exiled to the hinterlands, a subject spoken of in whispers in the faculty lounge by holdouts in tweed. The classics of Thucydides and Tacitus, the indispensable lessons of Magna Carta and Machiavelli, the Enlightenment thinkers whose words forged the republic in which these history classes exist—all relegated to the margins, if not disappeared altogether in an Orwellian purge. In their place: a curriculum festooned with the dogma of grievances, the obsessive categorization of historical actors into the Oppressed and the Oppressors, all nuance erased.
At the core of this decline sits the College Board, fee-collecting leviathan, churning out curricula as if assembling prefab houses, ensuring each course fits snugly within the ideological scaffolding of the moment. The AP U.S. History curriculum, for instance, has been the subject of periodic outrage, but outrage rarely coalesces into action, and so the revisions continue apace.
The founding fathers become problematic figures best understood not as revolutionary thinkers but as flawed men whose contributions must be weighed against the moral failures of their age. The Industrial Revolution is stripped of its dynamism and turned into a mere prelude to unionization. World War II? A grimly clinical exercise in discussing America’s failures rather than its victories. Meanwhile, the sprawling, millennia-long epic of Western Civilization is ignored altogether because, in the parlance of the new pedagogy, “Eurocentrism” is an academic crime of the highest order. And A.P. European History? Denuded of both faith and freedom.
The central crime, however, is the deconstruction of interconnectedness. History, when taught properly, is an intricate network of interconnected events, where no era stands in isolation, a vast living entity where the Renaissance does not exist without the rediscovery of Aristotle through the Muslim world, where the American Revolution is impossible without Locke and Montesquieu, where the atomic bomb is inseparable from a chain of events beginning with Newton’s alchemy and culminating in Einstein’s physics. But the modern high school history classroom operates with deliberate blinders, treating each event as an isolated moral parable, each figure as a flat archetype rather than a complex human being shaped by, and shaping, their time.
Even the language used in these history classrooms has been distorted beyond recognition, emptied of its substance and repurposed for propaganda. The past is no longer a story of human struggle, ingenuity, folly, and perseverance. No, it is a ledger to be balanced, a series of crimes to be cataloged, an endless exercise in proving that history itself is nothing more than a collection of systemic injustices. The impulse to judge rather than to understand has consumed the curriculum.
The consequences of this are dire. A generation raised without a coherent sense of history will lack the tools necessary to understand the present, let alone prepare for the future. They will not recognize patterns of civilizational rise and decline, will not see the echoes of ancient conflicts in modern geopolitics, will not grasp how legal frameworks, economic theories, and political structures evolve in response to crises. Instead, they will be taught to approach history as a court proceeding, perpetually replaying the past’s worst moments in search of verdicts that were never theirs to render.
Perhaps the most tragic irony is that history, real history, is more gripping than any fiction. It is a story of improbable survival, of civilizations crashing into each other, of mad kings and brilliant rebels, of collapses and renaissances, of human beings striving for meaning against the backdrop of an indifferent universe. But in the hands of modern pedagogy, it is drained of vitality, sanitized and repackaged into tedium, its heroes and villains flattened into mere placeholders for contemporary political concerns.
And so, history, in the proper sense, dies—not with the fall of an empire, not with the burning of a library, but with the slow, bureaucratic erosion of meaning itself. The students shuffle into class, skim through their sanitized textbooks, fill out their multiple-choice exams, and emerge into the world historically illiterate, unable to recognize the forces shaping their lives, armed with nothing but the flimsy armor of grievance studies and ideological pieties.
Unless—unless. There is always an unless, is there not? There remain, scattered like the remnants of lost civilizations, those teachers and schools—classical teachers, classical schools—who resist. Who still assign Herodotus and Burke. Who dare to present history not as a trial, but as an exploration. Who understand that to study history is not to sit in judgment but to listen, to consider, to grapple with the immensity of what came before. Yes, they exist. And as long as they do, there remains hope that history might yet be resurrected from the grave in which modern education has tried to bury it.
Michael S. Rose, a leader in the classical education movement, is author of The Art of Being Human, Ugly As Sin and other books. His articles have appeared in dozens of publications including The Wall Street Journal, Epoch Times, New York Newsday, National Review, and The Dallas Morning News.