Here's the thing. When San Francisco's Board of Education voted in 2021 to rename 44 schools — including ones named after George Washington and Lincoln — the committee behind the recommendations did not consult a single historian. According to reporting on the episode, one committee member reportedly dismissed the need for expert input by asking what the point would be of bringing in historians. The decision was later reversed, but the impulse, as Michael Freund writes in a new essay for The Daily Signal, has not gone away.
Freund, a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation and former deputy communications director under Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, argues that American schools have traded inspiration for deconstruction. History class, in his telling, has become an exercise in locating the flaw that supposedly invalidates everything else — a kind of permanent audit of the dead, conducted without much interest in context or proportion.
The facts he marshals are worth sitting with. A 2022 study published in the medical journal Cureus found that having role models, mentors, and heroes during adolescence was linked to academic performance, confidence, and behavior. Admiration, in other words, is not a soft variable. It moves outcomes.
Freund does not argue for whitewashing. He acknowledges that Washington made serious military errors at the Battles of Long Island and Fort Washington in 1776, and that Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War remains open to criticism. The case is not that these men were spotless. The case is that reducing an entire life to its failures is not honesty — it is distortion. 'Imagine teaching children about Babe Ruth while discussing only the times he struck out,' he writes.
The vacuum argument is where this gets uncomfortable for anyone who spends time watching what actually reaches children. American kids, Freund notes, spend countless hours on YouTube, TikTok, and other platforms. In the absence of historical role models taught with any genuine admiration, the moral imagination gets filled by whoever can hold attention longest. Visibility and virtue are not the same variable, but the algorithm does not make that distinction.
Voltage's read: The irony is almost too clean. Progressive educators spent years dismantling the 'hero narrative' in the name of nuance, and the result is a generation getting its behavioral cues from a recommendation engine optimized for engagement. That is not nuance — that is an abdication dressed up as critical pedagogy. Free enterprise in the attention economy means the content that wins is content designed to win, not content designed to form character. If schools won't teach kids who is worth becoming, the For You page will answer that question instead. It ships whether we like it or not.
