Attacks on historical truths and the teaching of history appear to have become a MAGA attack point with some school boards. This greatly concerns me. It should concern each of us.

I came of age as a young teacher in a very different political environment. My investment in the teaching of American history began then and spans decades.

In the post-Sputnik years, educational innovation was encouraged with grants from major corporations as we tried to catch up to the Russians.

I was spoiled. As a participant in three major nationally funded projects in social science education, my school received support to develop an innovative curriculum, including paying us for the summer to design a new curriculum.

Today, this is a distant dream. I’m saddened by how the teaching of history is being challenged and historical facts censored and/or erased. Those responsible for this are ignorant about how historians find and document truths, and about how the best teachers teach the subject.

Schools should hire teachers who have excellent academic backgrounds in the subject. Within boundaries set by the state, teachers should have the final say on both curriculum and instruction. Schools need to be vigilantly tuned in to attacks from the political extremes that result in censorship. School boards must trust experts in history, especially teachers themselves and historians who can act as consultants in shaping the curriculum. While parents and boards have the right to be critical of what is developed, they should have no power over the final decisions. Though Marin is less vulnerable to attacks on curriculum from MAGA, it isn’t immune to insidious attempts to undermine teacher authority.

This should not be a political battle. History teachers have a responsibility to teach the historical method and how this can be applied to best identify historical truths.

Imagine a history classroom on the first day of class. The teacher stands in the front. A person wearing a trench coat, disguised by a stocking over the face, hat pulled down covering the eyes, storms into the room shouting, “down with the dictator” in Greek and attacking the teacher with a fake knife. The assailant rushes out as the teacher quickly rises. Students gasp. The teacher is fine and tells the class to write down what they saw happen.

The teacher asks the students to write answers to these questions: “What happened? Who was the assailant?” “What did the assailant yell?” and “What was the weapon?” The students have varied responses that they share so the class can experience the diversity of descriptions.

None identify the weapon as a harmless retractable knife used in theater productions. None identify the attacker, who was another teacher in the history department. The teacher then asks the students, “How do we examine all these different accounts and then extract the truth?” “How would this be written in a historical account of this moment?” Even the teacher can’t necessarily provide “the correct” answer. After all, the teacher, under attack, didn’t watch the assailant’s exit.

So the class begins to explore how history is created, the challenge and the excitement in discovery. That should be the heart of the subject, the process of understanding how different versions of history are created, sometimes reaching a consensus as to what happened that is as close as possible to an accurate account.

The war in Ukraine provides a rich opportunity to teach history as students examine the historical backstory. Presented with news stories and articles that contain information on each country’s points of view, their past histories underlying the causes of the war and different U.S. opinions on the war, students could work together as small teams of historians-in-training to write an up-to-date history of the war.

This is teaching the writing of history at its best. It’s designed to report the truth as accurately as possible. As long as this remains uncontaminated by teacher bias, it should be free from parent or school board control.

I love history. I decry attempts to pollute its teaching. I urge our parents and local school boards to protect rather than undermine it.

Mark Phillips of Woodacre is a professor emeritus of education at San Francisco State University.