Hillsdale College made a strong showing at the White House Conference on American History last week.
The event, which took place on Constitution Day, was not only a celebration of the document’s 233rd birthday, but a meeting to address the Trump administration’s concerns that public schools are teaching history from an anti-American perspective.
Held in the rotunda of the National Archives, the program featured speeches by President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, and a panel discussion moderated by Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College.
Arnn described the event as “grand,” noting that he’s spent 45 years calling for a recentering of politics on the nation’s founding principles and a return to scholarship that fosters a deep understanding of those principles.
“The panel was very good; the intention was very good,” Arnn told the Collegian. “Most of the papers on the panel made a defense of two things: one, that history is a reality, and two, that the reality of American history is worthy to the highest degree possible, however flawed. That was the case and it was well made.”
Experts on the panel included Jordan Adams, associate director of instructional resources for Hillsdale’s Barney Charter School Initiative, and Wilfred McClay, a history professor at the University of Oklahoma whose history textbook has been promoted by Hillsdale’s Barney Charter School Initiative.
According to McClay, the event was the brainchild of Trump and others in the White House who have become increasingly alarmed by the riots and protests of the past few months, which have been motivated by hatred and disgust for America.
“The 1619 Project is disturbing to a lot of people,” McClay said of the New York Times’ retelling of American history, which dates America’s birth to the arrival of the first slave ship in North America. “But there’s something about the physical icons that are tokens of our history being torn down that hits people in a visceral way. There are people who have it in mind to completely rewrite history and leave out all of the nobility and complexity of the past and assert their own conventions in its place. The White House came to understand that this is an issue that the public was concerned about and should be addressed.”
Much of the panel’s discussion revolved around McClay’s highschool history textbook, “Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story.” Adams said that upon reading the book, he recommended Hillsdale endorse and promote it to Barney Charter schools across the country. Adams said he especially appreciates that the book treats students as intelligent individuals capable of coming to their own, reasonable views.
“Historians don’t have a respect or love for their country, but they also don’t have a love for their students,” Adams said. “If they did, they would present themselves with the whole truth and let them decide. We teach everything there is to know about slavery and the lingering effects of it. But we teach the good things about America, too. We talk about how the Declaration and the Constitution posited the ideas that helped bring an end to slavery and the men who fought and died to prove them true.”
Both McClay’s book and the White House panel have received blowback from the media, who have written them off as fascist or nationalistic, according to Adams, but he added he isn’t surprised.
“I think that’s why some of the critics have been so strong,” Adams said. “They recognize the jig is up. They’ve been exposed.”
Adams said that though some liberal teachers claim to disown Howard Zinn, author of “A People’s History of the United States,” a controversial history textbook many schools use, this isn’t true.
“That’s what students have been learning in the classroom for years,” Adams said. “It’s the same Marxist idea regurgitated in different forms.”
Trump emphasized this point in his remarks following the panel. In his speech, he asserted that the “left-wing rioting and mayhem are the direct result of decades of left-wing indoctrination in our schools” and that the progressive version of U.S. history has “warped, distorted, and defiled the American story with deceptions, falsehoods, and lies.”
The president also announced the creation of the 1776 Commission, a national committee to promote patriotic education and encourage educators to teach children the truth of American history.
Despite the president recognizing him by name for his work on “Land of Hope,” McClay said he doesn’t expect or aspire to be a member of the commission. Still, he said it will serve a vital need in the country.
“I think it’s absolutely essential that education include an understanding of our foundational institutions, what the American Revolution was about, why we have the Bill of Rights, what the Constitution says,” McClay said. “These things simply have to be there and they’re not.”