Invited to attend a TAH multiday seminar on the Cold War at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, social studies teacher Cade Lohrding was thrilled. Lohrding—born in the late nineties—has no memory of Reagan’s presidency. Yet he feels nostalgia for the decade which culminated in the end of the Cold War, and for the president whose actions helped end it. Although those politically active during the 1980s recall many partisan disputes, Lohrding sees these fights as less acrimonious than those in the years since. He’s concluded that Reagan’s optimistic, good-humored leadership style blunted partisan fights. Reagan was a leader about whom both parties “could say something positive.”
Kiowa County Junior High School in Greensburg, Kansas, provided a substitute teacher so that Lohrding could fly on a Friday into Burbank Airport in time for the seminar’s opening reception and dinner that night. Lohrding enjoyed this time of socializing – a chance “to talk with teachers from all over the country who teach different groups of kids. Yet we’re all experiencing the same problems.” Lohrding, who is the only junior high social studies teacher at his rural, K – 12 school, has few opportunities to share ideas with colleagues. The next day, he thoroughly enjoyed discussing primary documents with these new friends. “Then we went to the Reagan Library and learned more about the era. In the next sessions we got to relate what we saw to what we read in the documents. I’d never done anything like that before.”
Contrasting Today’s Partisan Fights with Cold War Unity
At the end of the seminar, an older teacher affirmed Lohrding’s sense that after the Cold War, partisan fights in America grew increasingly bitter. Professor John Moser, the seminar facilitator, asked the participants if there were aspects of the Cold War era they missed. One teacher responded, “I miss how united we were.” This prompted Lohrding to tell his colleagues,
I’m the youngest person here . . . . All of my life, it has been constant: one side hates the other. . . . It takes a natural disaster or some other horrible event for us to realize we’re not that different from each other, and that it’s really important for us to work together to get positive things done. We might agree or disagree about what that positive change is, but . . . . what matters is that we all recognize something has got to change. . . . Today, the public discussion . . . is negative, negative, negative. That really bothers me.
Lohrding has seen citizens pull together in the wake of natural disasters. Greensburg was devastated by a tornado in 2007, destroying the homes of Lohrding’s grandparents and aunt and uncle. Ranchers in the area immediately drove pickups into town to rescue those trapped under debris. Once the roads were safer to travel, Lohrding—then an eight-year-old, living forty miles away in Protection, Kansas—and his brothers and sister joined their parents in the clean-up effort. “People who live in southwestern Kansas help each other out automatically, expecting nothing in return,” he said. Lohrding did reap one treasure from that time, a photo showing him standing beside President George W. Bush, who visited the disaster site.
Lohrding’s Decision to Teach
With ambitions to run for elective office, Lohrding entered Wichita State University as an undergraduate political science major. He switched to 6th through 12th grade social studies education after concluding that politics had grown “too ugly.” Today he works to promote vigorous but civil discussion in his classroom. “There are 60 kids in the junior high, and I teach every one of them, watching them mature,” he says. To sixth graders, he teaches ancient world history; to seventh graders, geography and Kansas history; to eighth graders, US history from early settlement through World War I. Some semesters he also teaches an elective introductory business class.
Following the advice of his mentor at Wichita State, D. J. Spaeth, Lohrding builds students’ interest in social studies by relating lessons to current news and encouraging them to explain their own opinions. Teaching them that healthy politics entails debate, he often responds to students’ arguments with counter arguments. He pushes students to back up their opinions with facts.
Responding to Students’ Interest in the Election
Yet this fall, as the presidential contest grew rancorous, Lohrding avoided referring to it. His eighth graders protested. “This is US history happening right now!” they said. “Why are we not talking about it?” Changing tack, Lohrding asked students to evaluate the candidates’ campaign effectiveness. He showed videotapes of the presidential and vice-presidential debates, asking students to monitor the candidates’ responses to questions about their policy proposals. After a moderator’s question was answered by both candidates, “I paused the video, and asked the students to write notes on what the candidates said. Then I asked them to discuss which candidate spoke most convincingly about their policy.” Before beginning the exercise, he’d told students not to expect either candidate to “win on every single issue.”
Watching the presidential debate, students saw the candidates deflecting difficult questions and speaking instead about issues they could more confidently discuss. “Students got so annoyed,” Lohrding recalled. “They were like, ‘Just answer the question!’” Later, when they watched the vice-presidential debate, students found the candidates’ responses refreshingly on point. “‘Mr. L, is this what debates are supposed to be like?’ they asked. I said, ‘Yes! The candidates are supposed to be civil, and to base their responses on facts. It’s our job as viewers to check those facts, of course.’”
Although Lohrding never divulges to students his own political views or voting choices, he shares their excitement at the suspense of a close race. “So we talked about the polls every day,” Lohrding said. “We even checked the betting market,” tracking changing predictions on Polymarket.com’s electoral map. Lohrding also showed students maps of votes in the Electoral College since 2000, asking them to analyze political trends. Just before election day, Lohrding asked students at every grade level to predict the electoral outcome. He showed them polls that made district-by-district predictions, then handed out blank maps, telling them to color each state either red or blue. At first, “students protested, ‘All the polls are close!’ So I said, ‘Use your best judgment. Tell me how the election is gonna go.’
“I had one kid get it 100% right. And a lot of them came close,” Lohrding said. After noting on earlier maps the “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, many guessed correctly that, despite predictions, Michigan would vote as the other two states did.
Opening Dialogue Between Students and Parents
Later, at a parent-teacher conference, a father jokingly chided Lohrding for encouraging students’ interest in partisan politics. “Come on, man, you couldn’t put off that discussion? That’s all my kid wants to talk about now!” Lohrding said he understood the wish to forestall adolescents’ entry into partisan fights. “But your kid asked about the election. If they ask, and it’s in my curriculum, I’m teaching it.”
Another lesson plan evoked a positive parent response. To help students understand their own political convictions, Lohrding handed out a chart listing elements of the dominant parties’ ideologies. “Then I said, ‘Go through and highlight five of your main beliefs.’ There were kids who highlighted three on one side and two on the other. When one student pointed out that there was a donkey above the left column, and an elephant above the right column, the other students said, ‘Oh my gosh!’ and asked to mark a fresh sheet. I said, ‘No, you are taking that home to show your parents. Your parents will still love you, whatever you marked. Ask them to mark three of their own beliefs. Then talk with them about it.
“One parent emailed me to say this lesson led to ‘a genuine conversation with my kid.’”
Lohrding hopes to foster “engaged citizens who will register to vote, research the candidates, and find candidates they can support. I hope they develop political convictions they are willing to defend, even to those with different views. I hope they feel, ‘we can disagree, yet still be best friends.’ Our political opinions shouldn’t define our identities.”
