By JOONYOUNG HEO ’25

That one Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492 has long been an established fact in historical education. Many students, at some point in the American school system, will undoubtedly have come across it. It’s simple, it’s catchy, and it gets to the point.

It also represents how American history used to be taught, and why it was problematic. Indeed, the rhyme itself originates from a poem about the idealized version of this country’s history. Prior to the 21st century, this version was essentially synonymous with any and all historical education, both defining and limiting the content students learned and the means by which they learned it. “History” was only ever the accumulation of certain facts — that Lincoln freed the slaves in 1865, that Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1776, that Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492.

Today, it is commonly accepted that this sort of education is far from ideal. Even people who are not historians or history instructors have been made aware that remembering dates, figures, and landmark events should not define historical education. In recent years, as a consequence, schools have changed for the better, making efforts to shift away from rote memorization in classrooms across the country. Students are being pushed with increasing frequency to examine cause and effect, contextualize wars and treaties and executive orders, and consider the continuity of history.

The Advanced Placement (AP) history curriculum encapsulates this movement perfectly. The program revolves around six “historical thinking skills”: developments and processes, sourcing and situation, claims and evidence, contextualization, making connections, and argumentation. One thing the curriculum does particularly well, among others, is the “making connections” piece. Landmark events are no longer isolated in their own realities; AP exams frame each incident as one notch on a vast continuum, helping students understand, say, the implications of the American Revolution and thereby the causes behind the War of 1812.

Unfortunately, modern historical education, for all its avant-garde zeal, still leaves much to be desired. There is certainly more emphasis placed on AP “historical thinking skills” and other similar standards, but the material itself largely remains superficial.

This is partly because most schools test their students on factual content. To ensure that they retain what they learn, instructors are forced to squash decades of nuance and layers of character into summaries and study guides. These often comprise one-line descriptions that, above all, make history easy. Andrew Jackson was a racist — Abraham Lincoln was anti-slavery and righteous — Franklin Roosevelt resolved the Great Depression. These caricatures are not entirely unfounded, nor are they necessarily untrue, but they are frequently presented as hard facts and discourage students from looking farther and building real nuance.

Perhaps the most prevalent example is the question of a man’s moral integrity predicated on his support, or lack thereof, for slavery. It is very common to grow an immediate fondness for those historical characters who were against the practice of slavery, and equally to cast aside those who embraced it. This is only natural; all of us have done it at some point, and it makes things rather convenient.

A closer examination, however, muddles any attempt at blanket categorization. David Wilmot, who proposed that slavery should be banned in territory gained from Mexico in 1846, was driven purely by the fear that white laborers would be driven out of jobs by slaves in the West. He said nothing about the morality of slavery or its existence in the South. Conversely, Roger Taney, the chief justice who described black men as “beings of an inferior order” in Dred Scott v Sandford, had freed his own slaves decades prior and once called slavery “a blot on our national character.”

It is evident, then, that history is filled to the brim with nuance and contradictions, something often ignored in nature by textbook-sourced summaries and study guides and the like. Real historical thinking is only possible when the student avoids one-dimensional caricatures of figures and events, anchoring himself instead to the time period and digging into context.

This is a long and difficult process, of course, and it is likely an impossible prospect for most American schools. Buried in their education system is an inherent obstacle: a mandated schedule. In any such classroom, an instructor’s primary objective is to take his students from one date to another in the allotted time. Even when the students want to linger on and further explore a topic in class, their curriculum — whether mandated by the state or the AP program — simply does not have room for it. The instructor is not to blame; this is just how historical education has been defined for most of America.

And that, as they say, is the Exeter difference as seen in the History Department. It is the free reign given to our history instructors that is almost certainly our greatest strength. The Academy does not follow the AP curriculum, nor any other predetermined timetable that dictates the pace or material of a history course. Instructors have the liberty to plan their own courses; the same course might be taught by multiple individuals, but every classroom is wildly different.

Consequently, our instructors can facilitate real historical thinking. For one, they can decide on the balance between primary and secondary sources. They may even exclusively assign primary documents on some nights. Reading and analyzing impassioned letters, court opinions, and international treaties — as opposed to secondary analyses and mere summaries — are critical to understanding these documents in proper context and the historical figures behind them. Schools tethered to a mandated timetable have no such luxury.

The Exeter model allows for a great deal of spontaneity as well. If the students need to spend more time grappling with a certain topic, the instructor can simply add supplementary material to the following day’s homework, delay the next set of readings, and revise the syllabus accordingly. Our instructors don’t have all the time in the world, of course, but they have far more flexibility in what they choose to cover.

No history class here revolves around fact-based tests, either, and none of the material is meant to culminate in some end-of-year exam (the AP tests, for instance). Instead, most of the focus is placed on short essays and library projects, and these naturally facilitate historical thinking. The freedom of a few weeks to plan out and write an in-depth paper on a topic of choice is the very definition of opportunity — opportunity to pore over primary documents, to engage with the time period, to discuss real motives driving historical characters. Our instructors rarely expect anything different from us. By the end, each student will be close to an expert on a particular subject and, at the very least, emerge with a refined understanding of the period.

The kind of historical education practiced at Exeter, for this reason, is special and exceedingly hard to come across. Though most schools today ask students for more than dates and events, a mandated timetable limits any attempt to foster historical thinking. Free reign for instructors at the Academy makes the difference. It is no less important that Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492 — only that proper context and the nuances of character, if we are truly to think historically, must be pushed to the forefront.

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