We Can't Have A Consensus History

At least not the way we're trying to.

I’m a critic of standardized education. In my ideal world, there wouldn’t be a set curriculum for the median 9-year-old and up. I get that that’s a radical take, so here’s an incremental proposal. Standardized history education recently became impossible. We should stop trying to do it.

Our Cyberpunk Present

The cyberpunk genre of science fiction is essentially dead, or at least in cryostasis. It’s an eighties prediction of the near future in the developed world, and we’ve caught up to it, so now it’s just earthfic. Of the three staples of the genre, they got two out of three right.

1. ✅ Massive increases in inequality will mint a generation of angry punks. Writers in the eighties saw the spoils of an economic boom going to a much smaller percentage of the population than booms of the past had, and imagined a future where nobody stopped that trend from continuing, so that we’d end up a bunch of disaffected poor people surrounding an increasingly powerful elite. That all happened, IMO.

2. ✅ Information technology will shatter mainstream culture. Cultural homogenization is driven by practicalities. In low-tech days, a mountain range could determine whether or not you spoke the same language as the folks a few miles thataway. Cultural diffusion was bottlenecked by physical travel. Much later it was bottlenecked by the capacity of printing presses. By the eighties, it was bottlenecked by the capacity of broadcast TV. So far, increased connectivity had brought us closer together. But starting in the nineties, that trend was about to reverse. When you remove the mass communications bottleneck altogether, there’s no longer a reason to have just a few channels that everyone watches, or just a few books that everyone reads. It’s become economically and logistically viable to atomize, so we abandon the mainstream media bubble for a smaller, bespoke, artisanal media bubble. Which eventually means the mainstream media dwindles in significance until it stops even serving as a focal point.

3. ❌ This will all take place in virtual reality. Turns out, humans are even more adaptable than we thought we were. We don’t actually need our visual metaphors to be three-dimensional. If we ever end up in VR, it won’t be for the reasons cyberpunk gave.

Despite that miss, the prophesied vibe is here. We’ve splintered into so many tiny, angry groups that terms like “subculture” and “counterculture” have become misnomers. There’s no dominant culture to be a part of or rebel against, and we’re all too angry to build a new one.

An Incomplete List of Things That Have Been Cyberpunked

• The gender binary.

• Music genres. Spotify has well over a thousand, which is almost the same as having none. What does “pop” even mean anymore?

• Newspapers.

• Consensus about who won an election.

You get the idea. Everything built on shared media consumption is going or gone, like it or not. We are well and truly out of the Matrix, and while a lot of us kinda want to get back in there, nobody knows how. So we need to adapt.

Here’s another thing that’s gotten cyberpunked:

• The history of the United States.

(I mean, this is probably happening everywhere there’s cheap uncensored internet, but I’ll stay in my quaintly geographic lane).

History Ain’t What It Was

U.S. public schools haven’t been cyberpunked yet. The percentage of our children who attend them is falling, but it was still at 87% as of 2022. Institutional shifts like the No Child Left Behind Act created mandatory statewide and nationwide standards, limiting schools’ abilities to diverge. Public schools are also required to be defined by a geographic area, limiting the impact of increased connectivity.

This means we all have to agree on a curriculum. Time was, the great divide ran through science class—do we teach evolution as a fact, as a theory, or not at all? We had to fight over that, within states and nationally, because everybody had to learn the same science, but there wasn’t a consensus on a basic fact.

In U.S. history today, we’re not just divided on one or twenty basic facts. We’re also divided on vibes. Does U.S. history start in 1619 or 1776? There’s no fact of the matter, it’s a vibe thing. We could meet in the exact middle and say 1697, when Great Britain stopped executing people for blasphemy, beginning the disintegration of ideologies that led to our eventual separation. But now we’re just encoding my vibes. Compromise is not consensus. Compromise, in cases like this, tends to mean knocking a plurality belief off the podium and replacing it with the belief of a smaller minority. Just because it happens to look middle-y, even if it verges on nonsense, like the “evolution is just a theory” compromise.

Here’s a brute fact, not a vibe: we do not have consensus on how to tell our story. No matter how much you personally think we should. No matter if everyone you know and everyone you follow online agrees with you.

We don’t get to have one way of dealing with disagreement when the majority is right, and another when the majority is wrong. That just means whoever’s in power picks. We need to be consistent.

We understand this already in other domains. We can’t teach religious beliefs as fact in public schools. We can’t require that social studies teachers give their students a rebuttal to every Presidential speech the next day. We can’t mandate standardized tests where you’re asked a multiple choice question about what the best nineties TV show is ( ✅ Buffy the Vampire Slayer). Note that that last one isn’t directly in the Bill of Rights. We’re allowed to teach art history in ways that encode certain aesthetic assumptions, because we have something approaching consensus on those assumptions. But since we don’t have consensus on nineties TV, we can’t have a standardized judgment. Trying to put that question into the U.S. Regents exam is just asking for endless conflict among adults on how exactly to brainwash their kids.

Now that history’s been cyberpunked, it’s no longer a good fit for the institution.

Maybe it never was. Here’s a history fact I don’t think was part of Common Core—history classes are often used as instruments of genocide. In Turkey, state schools taught a generation that the Kurdish nation never existed and that Kurds weren’t even a real ethnicity. In occupied Ukraine and conquered Tibet, the invaders are teaching the children that they were greeted as liberators. In the United States, we required American Indian children to go to boarding schools to be taught that their parents were savages. I also just learned that German-Americans went through a forced assimilation starting during World War I—our government burned German books, banned speaking German in public, and pretty successfully erased “German-American” as a distinct culture. Then we just didn’t put that story in our history textbooks, and boom, done. The next generation didn’t even know they’d been robbed.

Conservatives who worry that our schools are trying to instill liberal values, and say that no government institution should have that power, are 100% correct. Yes, schools are trying to brainwash their kids with values more like mine than their parents’. I don’t care, and neither should you. Public schools lost the ethical right to teach history as soon as it became contentious.

Instead…

I first learned history at a Quaker school, as is weirdly common for Jews in the area I grew up. Quaker schools taught history differently, especially when it came to slavery and the Civil War. Here’s the version I got:

“Slavery was evil. Quakers worked tirelessly, alongside brave escapees like Harriet Tubman, to put an end to it by peaceful means. Tragically, a war over slavery broke out anyway, before they could succeed. The right side won, but war is never the right answer.”

Then I went to summer camp. I called the Civil War tragic, and a kid my age agreed. “So much death over something so abstract and trivial!” he said (this was a nerdy summer camp, that’s how we talked). That’s how I learned that public schools back then were teaching that the Civil War was over states’ rights vs. federalism, not slavery. Then I met other kids, whose community or independent reading had given other perspectives. They told me that Harriet Tubman carried a gun. They told me slavery might never have been abolished if it hadn’t been for the plan she made with John Brown to invade the South, seize guns from the military, and give them to the slaves. They told me the Civil War wasn’t just the right answer, it was the only answer.

This messy, confusing process is the best way to learn history. You first peer through the tiny submarine window of your own culture into the unfathomably vast ocean. Then you talk on the radio with other people, from other submarines. You compare notes, have arguments. If we ever get back to having a consensus history, that’ll be how we get there. Not by coercion. Not by compromise. Not by fighting over who gets to be the only one to speak.

Children should be given access to resources, in a non-prescriptive way, to educate themselves. They should be taught by their parents and community. They should be encouraged to talk about history with each other.

Learning history without standardized education will be glitchy and unreliable. People will grow up with terrible gaps in their knowledge, and believing things that aren’t true. In other words, it’ll be just like our current system, but pluralist instead of coercive.

Abolish history classes in public schools. And while we’re at it, let’s finally get that picture of a genocidal maniac off our $20 bill, and replace it with one that honors our 2nd and 13th amendments.