Olivia Waxman in Time Magazine:
Tom Richey, a teacher in Anderson, South Carolina, 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, despite the fact that 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.”
Richey is far from the only teacher wrestling with how to discuss Jan. 6 with students as the country approaches the third anniversary of the attack. Because there is no standardized history curriculum in the United States, there is no nationally required curriculum on Jan. 6. Teachers have to figure out how to link it to what they’re already teaching, whether as part of planned lessons on how the Electoral College works, different forms of protest, or post-Civil War era violence, or devote a class period to talking about it.
There’s been increased scrutiny of how history is taught in the aftermath of 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 more intersectionality in lesson plans and a deeper reckoning with the painful parts of U.S. history. At a time when there have been efforts to ban AP African American Studies in Florida, states are enacting laws designed to restrict how teachers talk about LGBTQ+ topics, and book bans are on the rise, many of the educators TIME spoke to say Jan. 6th falls into the category of topics that can be a political minefield.
More here.