Sam! Come hear your daughter’s news!
That’s what I heard from the bedroom as my wife called me into the living room to join the girls. Riley, our oldest, had just received her first set of AP exam scores, in the app now, of course, since apparently that’s how these things work now. As a sophomore she’d taken two classes: AP Environmental Science, which she loved. She’s all about nature, the outdoors, and it lines up with her dream of becoming a vet. And then, at my urging… okay, let’s be honest, my mandate, she also took AP African American Studies.
I love history myself. But I believe civics is the second most important thing we teach our kids, right behind literacy. As a father, I’ve got a few simple goals for my daughters’ education. One of them is that each of my girls grows up loving to read, and knowing their history. So far we’re on track for at least the first one.
Getting them to love history or even just appreciate why it matters has been the harder sell.
This past weekend I was glued to a Netflix mini-series called The American Experiment. Five episodes retelling the founding of America, timed to the country’s 250th anniversary. Of the five-plus hours across those episodes, the girls watched maybe the first 15 minutes, catching pieces here and there whenever I circled back to the next one. It didn’t matter to me. Whenever someone entered the room I would quiz them on a historical fact and bait them into a conversation.
Did you know that the first martyr of the American Revolution was a Black man named Crispus Attucks?
We the people… that’s how the Declaration of Independence opens
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…
My favorite thing about the documentary is that it treated the whole American project as exactly that: an experiment. Nobody knew how it would turn out. And the ideals they were listing off? They weren’t living up to half of them. My wife and I had some spirited debates all weekend (at least she watched it with me) about the gap between our aspirations and our reality. Any student of history will tell you, that’s not a bug, it’s a feature of evolution.
The girls have heard versions of all this before. Every road trip for our family is also a learning opportunity. Thus far we’ve traveled through about 33 of the 48 continental states and along the way we’ve visited countless museums and tried to understand the history of that place and its people. When the documentary got to the constitutional convention at Independence Hall, I reminded them of our own trip to Philadelphia, standing in that same room. When Hamilton’s name came up, they had a reference point already, from the musical they love and still belt out in the car. It makes the anthem, I’m not throwing away my shot! resonate just a bit more in context.
The saying goes that unless you know your history, you’re doomed to repeat it. I’ve also heard, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Either way, history presents a blueprint for understanding the present and preparing for the future. Whenever the girls ask why things are the way they are, we can almost always trace it back to a decision somebody made a long time ago.
Why can a president lose the popular vote but win the election? Look back to the compromises made at the writing of the constitution, including the electoral college.
How does a room full of white men claim all men are created equal while downplaying slavery? Look back to the power dynamics at play between wealthy, slave owning founding fathers such as Washington, Jefferson, and James Madison and the brutal debates over how slavery would factor into congressional representation
How did we get a Bill of Rights, and why did it take another 60 years for the Reconstruction amendments? These include the 13th, 14th, and 15th, abolishing slavery (except as a punishment for a convicted crime, that little detail is important), establishing birthright citizenship, and granting the right to vote. History tells us how we got here, and what it cost along the way.
But history doesn’t tell us everything. It’s not determinative. Most of the story is still unwritten, and that’s where civics comes in. For all of their flaws, the founding fathers knew the assignment was still an experiment. Every generation has to decide, do we keep this going? If our hypothesis is that we the people can be self-governed, if we create a system of checks and balances that allows for that self-governance, than we’re learning in real time what our wildest variable (we the people) can really do.
I think they’re ready for something better. But in order to take our experiment to the next level, they’ve got to become students of history in order to know what has worked and what has failed. That’s why I was so proud when Riles showed me her AP score. Honestly, I already had a hunch she’d done well. Back in May, at dinner, she casually dropped the real story behind Cinco de Mayo into conversation. I remember thinking, wait — did my daughter just teach me something? I loved it. Somewhere along the way, she picked up a different lens for seeing the world. It’s a bit sharper, and a little more grounded in context. I think we’re all going to be better for it.
The moving closing lines of the documentary are provided by Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester who is one of two Black women currently serving in the U.S. Senate, alongside Sen. Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland (marking the first time in U.S. history that two Black women are in the Senate at the same time). Here’s what she said that’s still sitting with me:
On the anniversary of our existence as a country, this is a pivotal moment to choose: Who are we?
Are we for some of us, or are we for all of us? I’m not going to lean back. I’m not going to quit. I’m not going to stop.
Democracy is worth it… It’s worth it.
I for one am not ready to give up on it just yet either. Maybe we just need better people running the experiment. Enter the next generation.
SDW3
everyday fatherhood 