Tim Walz ‘taught both sides of everything.’ In these polarized times, could he be a great teacher today?

When Tim Walz was a social studies teacher, he designed multi-week projects where students applied knowledge instead of simply regurgitating it. And he also presented multiple political perspectives, so his students could develop their own.

That’s what Walz’s students have told reporters, ever since Kamala Harris tapped him as her vice presidential running mate in the race for the White House. Without question, Walz was a superb teacher. But here’s a question almost nobody is asking: Could he teach as well today?

I doubt it. Standardized tests — and their associated pressures — make it harder for teachers to deliver the type of deep, open-ended instruction Walz provided. And our polarized political environment discourages teachers from addressing contested contemporary issues, which in turn denies students the opportunity to debate them.

Walz taught briefly on a Native American reservation and in China before he was hired at a school in Nebraska, where he taught geography. Too often, the subject is imparted as an endless litany of names — oceans, mountain ranges, national capitals — that kids are supposed to memorize.

Not in Walz’s class. To teach a unit on the Holocaust, Walz had his students research different episodes of mass murder across geography and time. They investigated the Armenian and Cambodian genocides alongside the Holocaust, trying to figure out what factors — economic, political, and cultural — promote these types of calamities.

For nine weeks, in those pre-internet years, Walz’s students pored over history books and scholarly articles. And at the end of the unit, Walz asked them to predict the most likely site of the world’s next genocide.

Their answer: Rwanda.

They were correct, of course. The following year, 800,000 people died in a three-month catastrophe of hatred and violence. Many years later, Walz’s students could still recall the shock of recognition that they had been so right about something so wrong.

But mostly, they remembered the distinctive learning experiences Walz created for them. “The biggest part was just the freedom to explore things,” one former student said. “Instead of just going in and having a teacher say, ‘Here’s the information, learn it, know it, you’ll be tested on it.’”

That’s what too much instruction became in the wake of No Child Left Behind, the 2002 federal law that required standardized tests in reading and math and penalized schools where students performed poorly on them. Schools gave short shrift to other subjects — including social studies — so they could focus on the ones that counted under the new federal guidelines.

Across the curriculum, meanwhile, the law triggered a “high-stakes-testing mania,” as one educator called it. Everyone and everything was measured, often several times a year, so schools could show they were making “progress” toward “proficiency.”

Walz left teaching for Congress in 2006, on the cusp of this sad revolution. It’s easy to imagine a post-2002 principal telling him to replace the genocide exercise with worksheets that would help students prepare for the next standardized test.

One can also imagine school leaders who would tell Walz to avoid “divisive” contemporary issues. Walz decided to enter politics after he took two students to a reelection campaign rally for George W. Bush in 2004. The students were turned away because one of them had a sticker on his wallet for John Kerry, Bush’s opponent.

Imagine the scandal that would erupt now if a teacher took students to a rally for Donald Trump or Harris. Even if the teacher came from a different political party than the candidate — as was the case with Walz, at the Bush event — they would be charged with propagandizing young minds.

That’s always a danger, of course, whenever teachers address political subjects. But that’s not a reason for teachers to avoid politics; instead, they should present different opinions and let students sort them out on their own.

And that’s exactly what Walz did. “He really taught both sides of everything,” recalled one of Walz’s students from Mankato, Minn., where he moved from Nebraska in 1996. “He wasn’t pushy about, you know, right or left or whatever.”

“He wasn’t pushy about, you know, right or left or whatever.”

Today, some of my fellow liberals would deride that approach as “bothsidesism”: schools should teach the “evils” of Trump and his MAGA movement, the argument goes, instead of engaging in “false equivalence” about them. And surely some people on the right would object that Walz — who served as faculty adviser to his school’s first gay-straight alliance — was violating the recent spate of state measures barring instruction about gender identity.

And he might even lose his job. Teachers around the country have been placed on leave for expressing views about the war in Gaza, on the assumption that they’re trying to sway students to their own side.

But we’ll never heal our ailing democracy until we give teachers enough freedom to explore complex political matters with their students, in a fair and evenhanded way.

I’m glad Walz did that before politics became his profession. I just wish we let more teachers do it today.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of “Whose America?: Culture Wars in the Public Schools” and eight other books.