From Juneteenth to July 4, celebrate 'reflective patriotism'

Stefan Romero is creating a community embroidery project called America's Tapestry.

Zachary Cote loves America "for what it is," not always for what it does, he writes. Schools need to rethink history instruction to enable "reflective patriotism," he writes in Education Week.

President Donald Trump wants history education to become "a celebration of America's greatness and history," providing an “accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring” characterization of American history.

"But accuracy and honesty do not always lead to unity and inspiration," writes Cote, who runs the history education nonprofit Thinking Nation.

He wants young Americans to celebrate the time between Juneteenth (June 19) and the Fourth of July as a "Civic Season," an initiative of Made By Us, a network of history museums.

The idea is to inspire young people "to understand our past and shape our future."

July 4th commemorates the moment a new nation was born, based on ideals that each generation since has worked to bring to life:  freedom, equality, justice, and opportunity. Juneteenth, celebrated just a few weeks earlier, reminds us of the struggles and hard-won victories in our ongoing journey to form a “more perfect union.”

Instead of teaching "singular narratives" about American greatness or American oppression, teachers should help students learn to interpret history, writes Cote. What "Alexis de Tocqueville called a “reflective patriotism” . . . is only possible if we first encourage students to reflect on both the good and bad within our country’s past rather than be strangled by it."

"To tell an honest history, we confront past sins," he writes. "But we also tell stories of resistance and resilience, of strength and solidarity, of hope." Students should learn "to ask tough questions, grapple with competing narratives, and construct their own evidence-based claims about the past."

Students believe slavery was uniquely American, writes Coleman Hughes in the Free Press. That feeds the "evil white people and good black people"narrative that peaked during the "racial reckoning" of 2020, when Juneteenth became a federal holiday.

It's time to break that binary, he writes. Teach students that slavery existed everywhere until about 250 years ago, and people of all races were enslaved. Arabs enslaved millions of Africans. North Africans -- the Barbary pirates -- enslaved Europeans and American sailors until the U.S. Marines "fought our country's battles" on the "shores of Tripoli." Around the world, slavery was ubiquitous. Asians were slaves and slavers for centuries.

The greatest emancipator of the 1860s arguably was not Abraham Lincoln, who freed four million slaves, but Czar Alexander II of Russia, who emancipated more than 20 million serfs, writes Hughes.

But young Americans know little about the rest of the world and little good about the U.S.

"Stridently vocal" about "the wickedness of the founding fathers," college students are more likely to know that Thomas Jefferson owned slaves than to know he was the president of the United States, according to Duke Pesta, a University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh professor who likes to quiz students on basic knowledge. Early in his career, his students’ “blissful ignorance was accompanied by a basic humility about what they did not know,” Pesta told a College Fix reporter. But over time he increasingly saw “a sense of moral superiority in not knowing anything about our ‘racist and sexist’ history and our ‘biased’ institutions.”

Don't whitewash the evils of slavery, writes Hughes. Teach more. Americans should know that slavery was a global evil. Then we "will we be able to unite as a country, end the slavery blame game, and restore a sense of color-blind morality."