Thinking Like a Historian…About What?

Wisconsin Historical Society: Subtle Indoctrination

Despite the Trump administration’s aggressive efforts, the left is still alive in our social institutions, and thus so is ideological indoctrination.

Seems the left and indoctrination go together like sharlotka and tea.

Often that indoctrination is brazen, and that’s what captures the headlines, such as President Trump’s tussle these past few weeks with the Smithsonian Institution. But other times it is a lot more subtle and hides behind the headlines.

Sometimes, as we journalists like to say, the lead is buried deep inside the story, and so it survives, thrives, accumulates, and becomes pervasive and culture changing. For the latter example, we have to look no farther than right here in Wisconsin and our very own Wisconsin Historical Society (WHS).

Indeed, when it comes to teaching history, if one wants to examine the headwaters of ideological revisionism, all you have to do is visit the WHS. Or at least read the signature textbook that it offers to teachers and school districts around the state: “Wisconsin: Our State, Our Story.”

I’m not too sure who ‘our’ is, but some of them probably aren’t legal.

Now, I should say up front, the people running the WHS aren’t necessarily a bunch of left-wing loonies who will fly south come winter. If only left-wing loons would. I think they probably are, but who really knows? After all, they did announce in 2025 that they would not fly the Pride flag during Pride Month, though they stressed that LGBTQ+ stories would still feature prominently in their work.

That last part of the pronouncement didn’t please conservatives, but at least the flag surrender really hacked off the pro-gender mutilation crowd.

It’s not even to say that the WHS and its staff are intentionally promoting an explicitly left-wing bias and propaganda, that is, a left-wing curriculum. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. I have no idea. But promoting it they are, one way or another, and so let’s take a look at the scheme—and I do mean scheme—of things.

No hidden agenda here

We’ll let the president kick things off. History isn’t just about facts, of course—something the president can be grateful for—it is about what facts become the story. The administration’s battle with the Smithsonian has exposed a much larger question still: Are America’s public institutions teaching students how to analyze history, or are they teaching them which curated history matters most?

Trump and his administration obviously think the latter (so do I, if anybody cares). So he declared war on the ideological capture of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Acronym-wise, that’s NMAH+. The plus is optional.

Trump signed an executive order directing the placement of corrective signs outside the museum, and critics immediately dismissed it as just more culture-war retribution. They missed the point.

As outlined in a new report by the Domestic Policy Council, the administration isn’t primarily accusing the museum of getting specific historical facts wrong. There is some of that, to be sure, but, more important, it argues that the museum consistently tells America’s story through a single, red-tinged interpretive lens:

The executive order based on the report explains that the administration believes the Smithsonian has shifted from presenting history to advancing “social justice” and that the current leadership “cannot be trusted to tell America’s story.”

The report seeks to document that transformational shift.

“Anthea Hartig, NMAH’s director since 2019, has explicitly stated that she sees history as a ‘prime tool of social justice’ and one of her roles as connecting ‘research and scholarship to activism and advocacy,’” the report states.

And that’s counter to the original mission of the NMAH, the report asserts:

But, the report states, that is no longer what visitors encounter.

“Instead, the Museum confronts visitors with materials intended to undermine faith in American institutions and the longstanding shared ideals of the American people,” it states.

The report also points to a broad pattern in the information it distributes:

One might as well look for Waldo as to try and find the Founders at the NMAH, the policy council observes.

The museum seems to have a central, identifiable set of issue priorities, the report asserts.

“The Museum’s Interpretive Plan directs staff to, ‘whatever the topic,’ tie exhibits back to a set of seven ‘core issues of our time’—specifically, race/identity, gender/sexuality, climate change, immigration/migrations, economic inequality, technological change, and nationalism/globalism—as part of its ‘commitment to relevance,’” the report contends.

Most important, the report emphasizes, the complaint is not that those subjects should never be discussed, but that they are increasingly presented through one dominant worldview—one that assumes America’s institutions are chiefly instruments of oppression and that the museum’s duty is to provoke visitors into activist forms of political resistance to that alleged oppression.

“The Museum can broaden the story without dissolving the story,” it states. “It can and should acknowledge slavery, injustice, mistreatment of Native peoples, and other grave wrongs without encouraging citizens to view their country mainly through suspicion, resentment, and division.”

Back in the Badger state

Given the ostensible educational objectives of the Smithsonian and the NMAH, all this naturally begs the question: Is the same interpretive philosophy quietly shaping public education, and, if so, is it doing so in Wisconsin?

The answer is—spoiler alert—yes, and in ways so subtle most people, even conservatives, don’t notice it. They should, and they should begin to ask questions. The very first inquiries need to be directed to the WHS.

As mentioned, one delivery system comes in the benign-sounding WHS textbook, Wisconsin: Our State, Our Story, which is built on a framework called Thinking Like a Historian. That phrase rightly sounds suspicious to many conservatives.

The “Thinking like a Historian” model was developed through the Wisconsin Historical Society’s education office and published in 2008 by historians Nikki Mandell and Bobbie Malone. Building on the work of Stanford’s Sam Wineburg, the model places greater emphasis on historical inquiry than on traditional, knowledge-rich, narrative-based history instruction.

In other words, it treats history less as a body of knowledge to be learned and more as a method of discovering and interpreting the past. If history were a restaurant, this model invites students to order off the menu, explore the ingredients in the kitchen, question the measurements in the recipe, and decide for themselves exactly what they think produces the dish on the table.

That is exactly what historians do, and the idea is to teach students those skills. The question is whether students can do that well before they possess a substantial foundation of historical knowledge. A professional chef can recognize the ingredients in a complicated dish because years of experience give meaning to every bite. Someone new to the kitchen may enjoy the meal but is far less equipped to judge what belongs there and what doesn’t.

Over the years, conservatives have praised parts of this approach—having students question authority instead of unquestioningly accepting it is valuable, after all—and academia has unsurprisingly embraced the methodology. As for Wisconsin: Our State, Our Story, it comes with a Student Activity Guide as well as a Teacher’s Guide to, in their own words, “help create a framework for critical thinking.”

The question is, how is all of this applied in the textbook and in the classroom?

Well, on the surface everything looks GREAT, as Tony the Tiger (as well as Tony the Evers) might say. Look through the activity guide, and students are happily interviewing grandparents, comparing immigrant experiences, and examining original documents. It’s downright play day in the history holodeck.

All of it is professionally done, well organized, and, frankly, a lot of it is just what you want your kids exposed to. But look a little closer, which is obviously something too few conservatives in this state have done, and a cumulative story emerges. It’s insidiously subtle, but unmistakable once the pattern is recognized.

In chapter after chapter, students are asked to examine hardship. They are fed stories of oppression and discrimination. They focus on identity and woke progressive values. They elevate the downtrodden as the sole heroes of history.

The teacher materials in Chapter 4 describe the arrival of non-Indians in the state “as well as the dramatic changes to Indian life that resulted.” In Chapter 5, they are advised to tell the story of Black Hawk, while the chapter follows the decline of Indian ownership of land, from having most of the state to a time when “these peoples held little of this land.” The teacher’s material has a bonus for students, too, a “Government Word Sort”: “In this activity students become more adept at manipulating the specialized vocabulary and language of government. It helps them become more familiar with the words … and with the concepts that they represent.”

Never too early to teach the vocabulary of the dominant societal power and of the values government represents, namely collectivism, eh?

In chapter 6, a chapter about people not born in Wisconsin but who chose to live in the Badger state—hey, what about me!?—we get a brief glimpse in the teachers’ material of a German immigrant to the state, before quickly delving into the life of Mexican-American musician Cris Plata, who was born in South Texas but apparently has been playing music in Madison and spins stories of his youth as a child of migrant farmers.

The teachers’ material in Chapter 11, entitled New Opportunities, New Challenges, dives right into Indian spearfishing controversies before heading to the Aldo Leopold Nature Writing Journal, and a link to the Aldo Leopold Nature Center, its Native American land acknowledgements, its climate change ideology, and its calls to support those who “continue to struggle against racism, inequality, and limited access. We see you. We see our community hurting from these injustices.”

The textbook itself for Chapter 6 has an entire spread devoted not just to immigration—an important part of the story, which is what the chapter is about—but to the discrimination and hardships they faced. There are pictures of sharecroppers who arrived from Mississippi. There’s “Mai Ya’s Long Journey from Thailand to Wisconsin,” which poses the question: Why did Mai Ya and her family live in a refugee camp in Thailand? The chapter asks to imagine what it’s like to be an immigrant:

What you won’t understand more about are the wildly successful lives and families of immigrant business leaders and industrial pioneers who embraced the nation and its freedoms and looked ahead to make Wisconsin what it is—an attractive, prosperous, and resilient state where people want to live.

Again, the book’s subjects absolutely belong in history. But their stories are featured and headlined not merely as part of Wisconsin’s story but as the important takeaways. Along with the stories, there are suggested activities that focus on keywords such as ‘slavery’ and ‘refugees.’ Yes, there are other keywords like ‘apprentice,’ but what stands out is the subtle direction the keywords take—toward immigrants as victims, and nudging all students to identify with victimization.

What is presented throughout is the story not even of class struggle but of an existential struggle against a systemic oppression. Students are pushed to think not so much like a historian as like an oppressed migrant.

What also stands out is the globalism. For example, the WHS correlates its text and guides to DPI standards, exhorting teachers to have students investigate “examples of rights” …including “the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, Bill of Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which individuals possess within the state, country, and world.”

Just for everyone’s information, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been captured by progressives who use it to espouse a universalist worldview underpinning rights of free movement through open borders and compelled national wealth redistribution. That it is listed as a primary document by a Wisconsin state agency, as if equal to this nation’s truly liberating and libertarian ideas, is as repulsive as flying a Pride flag during Pride month.

There’s more. Its correlations asks teachers to have their students critique instances where groups have been “denied access to power and rights”—we finally get to social justice—and it evokes calls to rally around labor unions and progressive community organizing (how “civil rights groups, workers, neighborhood residents organize to gain a greater voice to impact and change their communities.”)

It incubates a feeling of support for the promise of ever bigger government. One activity in the teachers’ materials deals with the history of two Wisconsin state parks, Copper Falls in Ashland County and Devils Lake in Sauk County, focusing on the roles played by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in creating work for the unemployed while also building public facilities for the two parks.

Indeed, perusing the text, the stories time and again tie back to the same issue priorities that the Trump administration accuses the NMAH of tethering its exhibits to.

Again, it’s not that the role of the WPA or the union movement or racial injustice should be omitted; it is that the context they provide for students to make assessments is ideologically skewed in assessments of importance in most cases, and they commit sins of omission in others. There’s plenty of language about discrimination and oppression, but comparatively little about entrepreneurship, free enterprise, or property ownership.

And just in case the point isn’t yet made, just head over the WHS website and look at other teachers’ resources. There are three featured resources for Grades 6-8: “… the history of Hmong immigration to Wisconsin in comparison and context of global conflicts and regional displacement”; the Milwaukee Civil Rights movement through the eyes of activist Juanita Adams; and “Rubie Bond, Oral History, and the African-American Experience in Wisconsin.”

OK, but you’d think a German beermaker might make his way into a featured slot instead of relegated to the back seat of the history bus, or maybe Diane Hendricks, or Herbert Kohler, or the Harley brothers.

This past July, I happened to be in the company of a family with a sixth grader. Shocking to me, the sixth grader asked what the Fourth of July was all about. This kid—a smart kid with accelerated status in his school—said he knew little about July 4th except “slavery.”

That’s what teaching kids to think like a historian gets us.

The Organizing Principle

Writing for the Fordham Institute in 2022, Daniel Buck addressed some of the fundamental problems with “Thinking Like a Historian.” His essential point is that students cannot think critically about things they haven’t learned, which is the point of the above July 4th story.

They need to be taught facts and then to explore context around the facts, rather than “assessing” facts through supplied context that might be ideologically tilted. A child can’t critically evaluate the Homestead Act without first knowing what it was or understand the historical significance and continued importance of July 4 without being taught the verified facts about the events leading to the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence.

In his piece, Buck, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, was critiquing an essay by George Packer, in which Packer argued that instead of “bickering over what events to learn about or how to frame our history,” we instead teach students how to think like historians, analyze documents, and apply the skills of criticism.

“Intentionally or not, he thereby invokes the progressive education of John Dewey, who argued that no content is in itself worth learning,” Buck wrote. “To Dewey, content was only the means by which students master academic and intellectual skills. Politically, this is appealing, as it allows any polemicist to maintain a commitment to rigorous academic standards without getting into the muckiness of debating what students ought to learn.”

You know, the muck of dispensing with America’s fight for independence and liberty and instead focusing on its alleged systemic racism.

“He [Packer] emphasizes skills over content,” Buck wrote. “In reality, however, … , content is essential. Every attempt to skirt around the tough content choices by constructing curricula with a skills-approach leaves our education vacuous.”

Buck homed in on the concept of “thinking like a historian.”

“What does that mean?” he asked.

Reading depends on knowledge, Buck continued. In other words, a young student without historical knowledge isn’t equipped to fully assess the transcendent importance of America’s independence and the libertarian values anchoring that fight, despite slavery. And all this gets to the point: “If a student wanted to read something like the 1619 Project with any meaningful comprehension or analysis, they need factual, historical knowledge. What are the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence? What do they say? What was chattel slavery and the Atlantic passage?”

Without the core knowledge base, the questions shape the answers. A momentous declaration dissolves into an equivalence of skewed perspectives. A story of an oppressive journey that struggles for freedom through immigration is presented as more important than the opportunities those freedoms offer once the journey is complete, not to mention why and how they exist. The student is taught to see those experiences through the lens of oppression from the start. So imagine two different curricula using the same “Thinking Like a Historian” worksheet.

One teacher teaches why property rights attracted immigrants, the Northwest Ordinance, the Homestead Act, Wisconsin’s timber, mining, and dairy economies, religious freedom, and constitutional government. It tells those stories through facts and events. The other educator teaches the journey of hardship, discrimination, and cultural identity.

Students in both classrooms may be thinking like a historian, but about what? Are they thinking as victims of systemic oppression or as or free men and women, as new entrants into a world of endless opportunity? Are they thinking as Wisconsinites and as Americans, or as migrants from afar, who refuse to assimilate because they have not been taught its values and necessity.

The skill isn’t neutral if the content isn’t balanced. The content is important, and it infuses this methodology no matter what “thinking like a historian” says. As E.D. Hirsch said, thinking itself is inextricably linked to the content of thought. The WHS model tells us how historians think, or attempt to think; Hirsch reminds us what they have to know before they can think that way.

The Wisconsin guides mentioned herein are not exclusively about discrimination and injustice. They also cover family history, geography, adaptation, and historical inquiry. But they lean into a narrative in which the central story is people escaping hardship and oppression and clinging to tribal identity rather than assimilating into a narrative of individual success and opportunity.

This is where the Smithsonian matters.

The Trump administration argues the Smithsonian gradually replaced one organizing narrative with another, leading to the suppression of America’s story of liberty and opportunity. The same thing happened over at the WHS. The debate isn’t really about museums so much as it is about every public institution that teaches history.

Much of the Wisconsin curriculum is thoughtful and professionally done. But if the organizing questions consistently revolve around oppression while giving comparatively less attention to the institutions and men and women who created liberty, prosperity, and opportunity, then the debate isn’t about historical thinking. It’s about historical manipulation.

Robert Pondiscio put it this way:

The WHS is Wisconsin’s empty pail. Wisconsin’s students don’t need to think like a historian, or a scientist, or an English teacher. They need to be taught core knowledge by actual historians, scientists, and English teachers.

The WHS and its allies in the DPI need to be called to account, and soon. Their pail should be made to runneth over with actual history.