[Part I can be found here.]
Some people regard Zinn’s work as so eye-opening it hits them almost like a conversion experience. Many of these people turn out to be teachers, exposed to Zinn at some point during their training. Some were already onboard with the ideas, but some take on the zeal of a starry-eyed convert to a newly revealed truth, eager to pass it on to the young people in their charge.
You can find testimonials from teachers about the Zinn approach at this site. I copied some down almost a decade ago when I first wrote the draft of this post. I haven’t gone through them again to see if these particular ones are still there, but they were there in 2013.
Here are some excerpts. The first is from an education professor at the University of Nevada:
When I first started teaching in multicultural education in a teacher education program in the college/university setting, I realized quickly that much of the resistance I experienced from teacher education students to the multicultural paradigm was a function of the face that few, if any, really knew United States history – that is, they resisted the sociopolitics of multicultural education because they believed in a whitewashed version of United States history – in essence, that “America is and always has been a just nation.”
I decided that to get my students to engage with the multicultural education subject matter, I needed to start with a multicultural history lesson. Naturally, I turned to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.
Of course, reading this history changed my students’ lives in profound ways – while it was painful for most of them to have their image of the United States changed, for the most part, for the worse (to be compellingly confronted with the atrocities committed by the United States’ government and related power brokers in the past that have continuing impact today), it was also finally affirming for some of them to have progressive multicultural education as a place from which to build a different, better, truly socially just present and future for themselves and their students.
This next one is from a Special Ed teacher in Washington state:
I came to teaching in a round about fashion – wanting to change the status quo in the world, I wanted to do anything but be stuck in a small classroom in a small town somewhere, teaching just a few students. The environment seemed too small, the impact too limited. Then I read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.
When I came to this quote in the first chapter, I wanted to shout it from the rooftops, sing it to the choir and put it on a billboard – it simply struck me as being deeply true and it gave me insight into how the classroom could be the beginning of enormous change. “The historian’s distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interests, where any chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian means to or not) some kind of interest, whether economic or political or racial or national or sexual.” This quote spoke to the importance of getting another history, the people’s history, into the classroom.
From a social studies teacher in Oregon:
I first started teaching because I wanted students to get more viewpoints than the traditional white male version of history. A People’s History was a big part of that initial inspiration…On the one hand, I felt compelled by political circumstances and a certain sense of responsibility to present historical events “objectively” and dispassionately. On the other hand, I could see that such an approach would undersell the importance of ordinary people who heroically struggled against oppressive institutions like slavery, while giving equal moral weight to the slave owners themselves. Reading about Zinn’s own experiences as a teacher and activist during the Civil Rights era made me realize that it is cowardly to back away from controversial issues, or to present them “objectively” with two morally equivalent perspectives. As humans, we make judgments by our very nature, even when we think we are being even-handed. I learned from Zinn that it is far better to make our views public and sincerely invite students to question them than to create the illusion of unassailable “objectivity.”
From another Oregon teacher:
Zinn’s materials seem to be most commonly used by middle and high school students, but even elementary-aged kids benefit from his work. I spent last year as a student-teacher in a second grade classroom, and Zinn’s approach to history informed almost all of our social studies content. Our textbook and materials called North America the “New World” and portrayed the continent as an untouched, largely people-less expanse of land just ripe for European settlers. And, of course, there were Indians interacting with peaceful pilgrims, nary a conflict mentioned.
My mentor teacher and I expressed our concern with portraying the past in this fashion and talked about the violence, how native peoples were treated, and the way most early settlers thought about the natives. You could see their little minds wrestling with ideas, asking things like, “Why couldn’t they just share?” or, “It’s not nice to kill people. Why would they do that?” I knew it would have been a lot easier to dress up as Pilgrims and Indians and reenact the first Thanksgiving, but we’re all exposed to that narrative in our lives. When given the opportunity, even second graders have the capacity to think critically about our past and become active participants in understanding history from a variety of perspectives.
I was worried that there might be pushback from parents, administrators, or fellow teachers, but I had the courage to try out some of Zinn’s work in the classroom after reading the intro of A Young People’s History of the United States, particularly this quote: “It seems to me it is wrong to treat young readers as if they are not mature enough to look at their nation’s policies honestly. Yes, it’s a matter of being honest. Just as we must, as individuals, be honest about our own failures in order to correct them, it seems to me that we must do the same when evaluating our national policies.” Thank you, Howard, for all of your work and inspiration.
From a high school social studies teacher in Mississippi:
I immediately went out and bought his book and my life as a teacher, as an American, and as a human was changed forever. A year later I was meeting a friend from out of town at a small pub for a cocktail and as I waited I met two young youth ministers from one of the local churches. After introductions I starting talking about Zinn’s book and they looked at me and said, “You mean you actually spoke about Howard Zinn to public school kids in Mississippi!” I told them my kids are truth seekers and Howard Zinn has debunked so much of the trash our textbooks have that my little anarchistic 11th graders were enchanted with any time spent on fighting the man.
Remember, these testimonials were already out there by 2013. These teachers were not teaching Zinn as merely a different point of view, an additional one to be pondered by students who were already well-grounded in American history, the Federalist Papers, and the Constitution. They were teaching it as a cause that gave their own lives and careers new and deeper meaning – and as that last teacher wrote, his “little anarchistic 11th graders” were “enchanted” with it, even in Mississippi.
Currently I found the following at the Zinn Project site:
Tens of thousands of teachers, in every state in the United States, access people’s history lessons from the Zinn Education Project website. An average of 20 to 30 more sign up every day. They find classroom lessons (most are from Rethinking Schools) and support. They join a network of teachers committed to teaching outside the textbook. Below is an overview of engagement with the Zinn Education Project website, as of January 2022 with some more recent updates.
If you scroll down on that page, you have more testimonials under “Teachers Report Back”. You can also find a graph of the growth of the number of teachers registered for the Project: “from 4,000 in 2008 to almost 150,000 today.” There is also a map with the number of teachers in each state signed up for the lesson plans.
Of course, Zinn is hardly the only path to this sort of education nowadays. He’s almost quaint, really, compared to The 1619 Project and the various varieties of Critical Race Theory. But he’s still a big force, and getting even bigger all the time, and his work has borne much fruit over the years.
