Educators move gingerly around the lessons of a history too recent for comfort
BY OLIVIA B. WAXMAN
TOM RICHEY, A TEACHER IN ANDERSON, S.C., is hesitant to call the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol an insurrection when he’s in his classroom. “If a teacher were to come into a mostly Republican community talking about the January 6 insurrection, that’s a politically charged term,” Richey says, though the 2023 report by the bipartisan House Select Committee charged with investigating the violence refers to it as such. “I don’t approve of anything that happened on January 6, but I think for a teacher to use a term like insurrection in a classroom setting would be unnecessarily partisan and inappropriate.”
When the anniversary of Jan. 6 rolled around this year, Richey was far from the only teacher wrestling with how to discuss the topic with students. Because there is no standardized history curriculum in the U.S., teachers have to determine whether and how to link the event to something they are already teaching, perhaps as part of a planned lesson on different forms of protest, for example.
But how history is taught has been a matter of increasing controversy for years, and especially after the 2020 murder of George Floyd. Some conservatives argue there has been an increased focus on identity, sexual orientation, and race in the classroom that vilifies white people and sours young people on America. Some liberals, on the other hand, have pushed for what progressives call more intersectionality in lesson plans and a deeper reckoning with the painful parts of U.S. history. At a time when book bans and restrictions on teachers are on the rise, many of the educators TIME spoke to say Jan. 6 amounts to one more unmarked minefield.
MARLON WILLIAMS-CLARK, a teacher in the Tallahassee, Fla., area, does not bring up Jan. 6 at all in his classes—at least not since a parent complained about him in 2021 because he had sent students a link to information about what an insurrection is. He ended up in the school’s human-resources office, he says, and had to send an apology letter to families. He has no plans to try to bring it up again because of “pressure that is coming from the state.” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is running for President, has made part of his platform cracking down on education he frames as “woke” or “indoctrination.”
Bob Fenster, a teacher in Hillsborough, N.J., assigns his students a reading of the 1787 letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams’ son-in-law, arguing
