“A people that takes no pride in the noble achievements of remote ancestors will never achieve anything worthy to be remembered with pride by remote descendants.” — Thomas Babington Macaulay

What does a child need to know about the history of the Western world? The College Board claims to know the answer. Until 2019, the AP World History exam required students to master a sweep of history stretching back 10,000 years, from the first river civilizations to the present. Today, those requirements are much thinner. AP World History: Modern begins its tested content at 1200 AD. Ancient Greece and Rome—the birthplace of philosophy, republican government, Western aesthetics, and nearly everything that follows—are absent from the exam altogether. A student can earn a perfect score without ever being asked about Socrates, Augustus, or the Battle of Marathon.

This is not an isolated retreat. A 2017 report by the National Association of Scholars found that the College Board’s AP European History exam had scrubbed all mentions of religion, intellectual history outside of secular modernization, and the history of political liberty. The College Board later made very limited revisions, and the course remains a shell of what it once was.

While standard McGuffey Readers led young post-Civil War students through Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, and the Bible, many of today’s elite college students lack the attention span and background knowledge required to read a full book. College history courses have replaced the Western tradition with an approach that emphasizes race, class, and gender social history. Students receive not a comprehensive picture of the past but a prosecutor’s brief against it.

For decades, American education has been conducting an experiment in civilizational self-erasure. As documented by Professor James Hankins, formerly of Harvard and now at the University of Florida, Western civilization courses “began to disappear from American high schools and colleges” in the mid-1980s after serving as the linchpin of undergraduate education throughout the Cold War era. The National Association of Scholars went back further, tracing “the decline and near extinction of the Western Civilization history survey course” at America’s top colleges from 1964 to 2010. Generations of students have come of age without systematic exposure to the tradition that produced the world they inhabit.

Even worse, many students are taught to hate America’s history. An honest study of history cultivates gratitude for the achievements of our predecessors, respect for their sacrifices, and an appreciation for those benefits of civilization we enjoy but did not build. The critical progressive approach to history that dominates education today breeds not gratitude, but disdain. Students are asked to critique an inheritance they don’t understand, tear down institutions and legacies they cannot build, and accuse the past of sins while turning a blind eye to their own.

A people who lose confidence in their institutions—who no longer understand why achievements like representative government, jury trials, reasoned debate, liberty, or the rule of law are worth protecting—will not long maintain them. Knowing this, we recognize what must be done: only if we teach our children to know, remember, and protect our civilization will we be able to sustain it.

This is why Hillsdale College’s K-12 Education Office has partnered with Encounter Books to create The Official Golden Thread Curriculum, a new teacher’s guide to Western civilization that deserves to be ubiquitous in America’s classrooms.

The Golden Thread itself is a stunning achievement: a beautiful, two-volume, heirloom-quality history of Western civilization authored by Professor Hankins and Professor Allen C. Guelzo. It walks students from the dawn of the West in ancient Greece through the rise of the Roman Empire and the establishment of Christendom to the Renaissance and modern times. It unites historical facts with beautiful illustrations, maps, charts, and primary sources to help students approach our ancestors not as subjects to be dissected but as people to be understood on their own terms. Unlike contemporary textbooks, the Golden Thread does not interrupt students with quiz questions, skills practice, or reminders of learning objectives. It helps students become learned adults.

Together, The Golden Thread and its attendant curriculum developed by Hillsdale’s K-12 team constitute the most ambitious effort in a generation to restore Western civilization to prominence in America’s high schools.

The Golden Thread and its teacher’s guide walk students through known historical facts, including those found in primary sources, because thinking first requires understanding individuals as they understood themselves. Then it helps readers understand how the facts relate to each other in a meaningful and honest narrative, shows how shared symbols, stories, phrases, and ideas are embedded within that narrative, and allows students to exercise judgment and discretion while interpreting history. Students not only become knowledgeable but grow to love Western civilization and embrace the Western tradition as their own.

Take, for example, The Golden Thread’s treatment of the Peloponnesian War. First and foremost, students study the actual events and people in the war. They analyze the combatants, why they were fighting, and where they fought. Students discover who Pericles, Alcibiades, Nicias, Lysander, and Cleon were and what they did. They examine Thucydides and consider how he describes the historian’s work, in contrast to Herodotus, the “Father of History,” who came before him.

Armed with this knowledge, students soon see the roots of ideas and debates that blossomed over the centuries and still grip us today. They grapple with whether might makes right. They see the virtues and excesses of nascent democracy and its recurring descent into oligarchy, tyranny, and cruelty. And they observe how the internal rot of hubris and greed destroys an empire untouchable by mere armies.

In the Melian dialogue, the irrational Athenian rage after the Mytilene revolt, and the collapse of Athenian democracy in Sicily, students can see themselves and our own times. They can look with wonder upon what those before us accomplished, and with horror at how they lost it. Students learn the painstaking difficulties of erecting civilization and how even the most powerful and sophisticated can nonetheless choose savagery.

At the start of his history of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides wrote, “I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.” His words could be applied to the entirety of Western civilization. Whether it is the canon written in words, etched in the stones of cathedrals, embodied in the halls of government, or revered in the hearts of citizens, the West is our possession—an inheritance more precious than gold.

That inheritance has been neglected. Now we can begin to restore it.