Teaching the Civil War, 150 years later

Take an empty half-pint milk carton. Glue 12 Popsicle sticks onto the sides and hold them in place with a rubber band. Pretend it is a wooden warship.

Now make another, and wrap both vessels in aluminum foil. Float your two “ironclads” in a plastic tub of water. Bombard them with blue marbles. Pretend they are the Monitor and the Merrimack.

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“Guess who won this battle?” teacher Cindy Agner asks.

“No one,” the kids chorus.

“This is what they call a draw.”

And this is how the Civil War comes to life for a roomful of fourth-graders in Northern Virginia, 150 years after the nation’s deadliest armed conflict began. Agner’s reenactment of the landmark naval Battle of Hampton Roads — a tactile lesson the vet­eran teacher dreamed up this year — drew her Fairfax County class into a chapter of American history that has long provoked education debate.

The war’s sesquicentennial, starting Tuesday with the anniversary of the attack on Fort Sumter in South Carolina, provides a “teachable moment” for schools everywhere. But how and when students learn about slavery and secession, blue and gray, Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee, Bull Run (or Manassas) and Appomattox varies enormously from state to state, school to school and even teacher to teacher.

This year, Virginia learned anew the sensitivity of Civil War education when the state Board of Education withdrew approval of a fourth-grade textbook — “Our Virginia: Past and Present” — that asserted thousands of African Americans fought for the South. Most historians reject that claim.

Last year, the Texas State Board of Education voted to require eighth-graders to study the inaugural address of Confederate President Jefferson Davis alongside President Abraham Lincoln’s first and second inaugurals and his Gettysburg Address. That was one of many controversial revisions to Texas standards.

Jeremy A. Stern, a historian who reviewed state academic standards this year for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, said differences in the timing and scope of Civil War education across the United States are dramatic. Often, he said, the war is not taught systematically until middle school.

The big question: Why?

For elementary teachers, a central challenge is to explain why the war happened. Edward L. Ayers, president of the University of Richmond and a historian who has written about the Civil War and the South, said that he was working one day on an essay on nuances related to that question when his 11-year-old daughter walked into his study with a textbook and asked, “Daddy, what caused the Civil War?”

“I paused a moment,” recalled Ayers, “calculated the costs and benefits of trying to explain historic complexity to a young person, and said, ‘Slavery, honey.’ ”

As Ayers elaborated in an e-mail: “That’s the bedrock of everything else that happened, even though white people at the time, especially in the North, might not have felt it so directly. They would have said they fought to maintain the federal government and the Union. But Americans would not have been arguing about that in the first place without the challenges slavery presented.”