‘1776 Pledge’ won’t ‘save’ Kansas schools. Teaching kids the truth about history will

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Last week, Kansas gubernatorial candidates Derek Schmidt and Jeff Colyer signed something called the “1776 Pledge to Save Our Schools,” a document that purports to endorse an “honest, patriotic” education in the state.

Signing such vague documents is an old habit in politics, particularly among Republican candidates. Most are harmless. Pens are wielded, photos are taken. Everyone goes home happy and the pledges are forgotten.

But the 1776 Pledge deserves some attention, particularly in our region, where quality schools remain the top priority for just about everyone. It poses an important question: Should we lie to our kids, or tell them the truth?

Let’s see.

“Our children and grandchildren should be taught … to respect our founding principles of liberty and equality,” the pledge says. And it is true that the Declaration of Independence, which we will all celebrate in a few days, insists all men are created equal, and are free at birth.

But it’s also a fact that the man who wrote those words, Thomas Jefferson, rejected liberty and equality in his own life. “The Blacks … are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind,” he wrote, six years after the Declaration.

Jefferson died “a monument to a giant chasm between his words and deeds on the question of race and liberty,” historian Paul Finkelman wrote — not last week, or last year, in the middle of some critical race theory fever, but nearly three decades ago.

How should teachers and parents approach this contradiction, and others like it?

If you’re Jeff Colyer or Derek Schmidt or anyone else in the 1776 crowd, you stick your fingers in your ears and hope it goes away.

The pledge they signed is based on the 1776 Commission, a Donald Trump-appointed group which issued a widely-criticized report in the waning days of his presidency. It’s full of weird excuses, partial explanations, distortions and falsehoods.

The founders couldn’t abolish slavery, the commission said, because that would enable a “possible future drift toward or return to despotism,” which is as absurd as it sounds.

You could teach students American history without examining its contradictions and failures, of course, which is what the 1776 Pledge is all about. But to do so leaves students ignorant of their country’s full story, which is teaching a lie.

Someday those students will discover they were lied to, and they will resent it. Or they’ll never learn the truth, and our nation’s problems will fester.

There’s another alternative: You can teach American history in all its abundant messiness. Embrace the brilliance and the errors of the founders and the other great figures of our nation.

They were patriots. They were hypocrites. They were intelligent. They were prejudiced. They were human beings, flawed and miraculous at the same time.

Sometimes they were right. Sometimes they weren’t. Their greatest gift wasn’t words on paper, but an idea: America is never finished. It can be made more perfect, a process that continues in our day.

We stumble at times — not all voices are heard, not everyone has a seat at the table. We have some work to do. At its best, though, the people of the United States try to be better today than they were yesterday.

Teach that. The Republic will not fall if students learn the full truth about our history.

The 1776 Pledge that Schmidt and Colyer signed claims “the United States of America is an exceptional nation.” If that’s true, there’s no need to teach history or civics. We’re already exceptional.

But American exceptionalism isn’t a finished fact. It’s still a goal. That’s what makes this country so important, and that’s what students, and all of us, should learn and remember.