A discomforting anniversary and difficult time for teachers
As a history teacher, I approach one of the most troubling anniversaries in recent history, January 6, with trepidation. In this new year, the Capitol riot’s shadow looms over another presidential campaign, and recent polling rates Donald Trump as frontrunner. In the name of “objectivity” and out of fear for their jobs many teachers will duck the riot’s anniversary and historical importance as a controversial topic likely to provoke unacceptable classroom partisanship. Doing so is understandable, but a mistake.
There exists a dangerous chilling trend in education whereby many subjects have become effectively unmentionable. The stakes were driven home recently when members of Congress called three college presidents on the carpet, grilled them about how the Israeli-hamas war was discussed at their elite universities, and provoked the resignations of the presidents of Upenn and Harvard.
If the leader of an Ivy League institution is vulnerable, consider the plight of publicschool teachers in states where legislators have restricted teaching of “controversial” subjects ranging from slavery to the history of Native Americans, the Holocaust, racism, Jim Crow segregation, and gender identity. PEN America Researcher Jeffrey Sachs has identified 35 states that have passed or considered laws sanctioning teachers whose lessons might provoke students to feel “discomfort, guilt, or anguish.” Teachers have been fired both for promoting critical race theory and criticizing their school’s antiracism initiatives. I began my career nearly 40 years ago and can’t recall a more difficult moment for teachers of history, politics, literature, climate science, and current events.
For me, teaching is an act of creative improvisation featuring a lot of behind-the-scenes research and planning, conversation with students, questions, more questions, and a smattering of classroom jokes. The best teachers I’ve encountered operate with ad hoc spontaneity grounded in hours of planning. But, at a moment when many of the most important historical subjects have potential for career-ending missteps, why should teachers take creative risks? Why should they improvise new lessons? Why should they teach the Capitol riot?
I believe we have civic and intellectual obligations to do so. If educators take a pass on polarizing subjects, we cede the ground to a popular culture awash in misinformation and fake news. The riot itself was a product of that culture. Trump supporters believed his lie that he had won the 2020 election, and he continues to employ it as central to his political messaging. It’s therefore likely that misinformation and violence will mar the upcoming contest. Instead of being surprised by such developments, students deserve to be shown how recent history contributes to ongoing events.
My own lessons on January 6 are all works in progress. They keep evolving to encompass ongoing events (convictions of rioters, legal efforts to keep Trump off state ballots), new sources, and different approaches. Excellent books have been written about the riot. I have used Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s “Peril”, Mark Bowden and Matthew Teague’s “The Steal”, and Jamie Raskin’s “Unthinkable.”
I’ve also employed countless media sources and frequently excerpt the New York Times video analysis of the riot, “Day of Rage: How Trump Supporters Took the U.S. Capitol.” The video does justice to the primal violence of an assault in which five people died, 140 police officers were injured, over 1,000 arrests were made, and nearly 600 criminal convictions have been passed down.
For larger context, I’ve had students read global democracy ratings compiled by Freedom House and The Economist.
They also sample writings by historians such as Timothy Snyder, Heather Cox Richardson, and Jon Meacham.
Still, by far the most memorable source I’ve used was a Zoom conversation between my high-school contemporary issues class and Connecticut Congresswoman Jahana Hayes, D-5, that took place at the first anniversary of the riot. A former history educator and National Teacher of the Year, Hayes held us riveted as she described her experience that winter day at the Capitol in 2021. Barricaded in her office with her husband (a career police officer), 12-yearold son, and two staffers, Hayes described waiting anxiously
“for hours, in the dark” as the mob grew in immediacy from ominous images on a TV screen to an angry presence just outside her locked door. Her husband resorted to “looking for something we could use as a weapon in case the door was breached.” Over five hours, “I kept thinking, how come no one is coming to rescue us.” A woman of color, Hayes reported seeing “a noose hung up on the lawn . . . where the president was sworn in at inauguration.”
With order finally restored, Hayes was called to the House chamber to certify the election. Walking through the Capitol, she saw “broken glass . . . crime-scene tape everywhere, and police officers and National Guard lying on the floor exhausted.”
As she began to tell students why it was so important for Congress to proceed to certify the election that night, Hayes suddenly changed direction. “Oh, the other thing,” she said, and proceeded to recount passing those hours in her office writing notes about what was happening. Later, “I realized I was lesson planning. I had a bunch of essential questions. I had a bunch of ‘how would you pose this to students?’ . . . Based on the information that you have, what do you think is going to happen next? I was jotting down primary recollections of everything. That’s what I used to do when I was teaching.”
Doing her congressional duty through a crisis, Hayes was also modeling exemplary history teaching. She immediately recognized the extraordinary significance of the event she was caught up in. She understood that she was a primary source for understanding the riot. She acknowledged that our ability to teach, learn about, and make sense of an event is contingent on the amount of information we have at our disposal. And, she said, “we have a responsibility to ensure it does not happen again.” We cannot live up to that responsibility by censoring the riot out of our classrooms.