Let’s suppose you’re a biology teacher in an American high school. A student announces in class that she doesn’t believe in human evolution; she thinks God created Adam and Eve, as the Bible says. What should you do?
A) Tell the student that the issue is too controversial to discuss;
Credit: KYLE KIELINSKI
Credit: KYLE KIELINSKI
B) Ask her to present evidence for her point of view;
C) Tell her that she can believe whatever she wants, but she also needs to be able to explain the scientific principles of evolution.
The correct answer is C. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously quipped, everyone is entitled to their own opinion but not to their own facts. And it’s the job of our schools to help young people see the difference, without requiring them to believe anything.
That’s what we need to do when we teach about the events of Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob attacked the U.S. Capitol on the false belief that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election because of voter fraud. Trump continued to repeat that fiction until the 2024 contest, which he won fair and square.
But almost a third of Americans — and two-third of Republicans — continue to insist that the 2020 election was fraudulent. They are citizens and taxpayers, and many of them are parents as well. As Trump returns to the White House, some of their children will echo his election falsehoods in school.
And teachers will be tempted to choose Option A: tell the class we can’t talk about it. Indeed, some school districts have instructed their teachers to avoid the subject. It’s too dangerous, too provocative, too controversial.
That’s the coward’s way out. And it’s an abdication of our duty as educators, which is to prepare our young people to become knowledgeable and engaged citizens. We can’t do that if we sidestep the issues that divide us.
Nor should we encourage election deniers to present the evidence for their view in class any more than we would ask a creationist to do so. That imagines there are equally informed and reasonable perspectives on both sides of these matters.
There aren’t. There is no scientific evidence — none — for the proposition that human beings were created whole; all of the facts indicate that we evolved from other mammals. Likewise, dozens of investigations and court decisions found that Joe Biden — not Donald Trump — won the 2020 election fairly and that voter fraud was minimal.
But there are plenty of legitimate controversies around Jan. 6, too. Being vigilant about the facts also means acknowledging the places where informed people disagree.
Were the Jan. 6 protesters engaged in an “insurrection”? What role did race — and racism — play in their behavior? And what kinds of punishments should they receive?
Unlike the vote count in 2020, all of these questions are fully debatable. Pretending otherwise plays fast and loose with the facts, just like election deniers do.
Yes, a Colorado court found that Trump had engaged in an “insurrection” on Jan. 6 and should therefore be ineligible for office under the 14th Amendment. But everything hinges on how you’re defining the word.
“Insurrection is a broad, broad term,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said during the Supreme Court’s deliberations about the issue. “And if there’s some debate about it … we would be deciding whether it was an insurrection when one President did something as opposed to when somebody else did something else.”
The Supreme Court eventually overturned the Colorado ruling on the grounds that only Congress — not individual states — could bar candidates under the insurrection provision. But surely there was — and is — debate on its meaning, as Roberts correctly asserted.
So it would be a mistake for a teacher to label the Jan. 6 events an “insurrection,” as if that’s a fact. We should instead ask our students if it was an insurrection — and why.
Ditto for the issues around race. Here, too, we should share the facts: some Jan. 6 protesters carried Confederate and Nazi regalia. But does that mean that the broader protest was motivated by racism? That’s a different and more complicated question. We should ask it, instead of assuming — or imposing — an answer.
Finally, we should also ask whether the 1,270 people convicted of assaulting the Capitol received proper sentences and whether they should be pardoned, as Trump has pledged to do. Again, we must make it clear that their claims about a fraudulent election are false. But that’s a different matter from how they should be sanctioned, which we can — and should — deliberate.
Most of all, we should tell our students that they can believe whatever they wish about the 2020 election. Yet they should also know that there’s going to be a test one day, and they’ll be asked who got more votes. There’s only one right answer to that, and it’s not Donald Trump.
Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of “The Case for Contention: Teaching Controversial Issues in American Schools” and eight other books.
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