There is a simple step America’s educators can take to improve civic awareness dramatically. Teach history backward.

That’s how I learned it. One of the best teachers I ever had was a man who taught me high school history. On the first day of class, he announced that we would be learning U.S. history starting with recent events. We began with Watergate and the Vietnam War, then moved back through the 1950s, the Red Scare, and the Korean War. From there, we covered World War II, the Great Depression, then the 1920s. Eventually, near the end of the school year, we found ourselves in the American Revolution.

It was a curriculum that worked brilliantly. It was the early 1980s, and Vietnam was something very real to those of us in high school and college. Many of us had friends, neighbors, and family members who had served in the war. It was exciting to study the conflict.

It also made liberal bias very difficult to weaponize. When the topic being taught involves living people who can challenge the accuracy of the curriculum, it makes it hard to bowdlerize the truth the way something like the “1619 Project” does.

In high school, I saw this in action. Our teacher presented both sides of the Vietnam War, both the anti-war movement and the men who had gone over there to fight. One memorable afternoon, we had, as a guest speaker, a Vietnam veteran. When one of the faculty members in the assembly got up to give a lecture about the “immoral war,” the man shot back: “All I know is we were there to fight communism and things got a lot worse when we left.”

He was right. In the first three years of the communist “peace,” more people were killed in Indochina than had been killed in the 13 years of the anti-communist war. Somehow, this fact is rarely mentioned when the media discuss Vietnam.

There was more, which I discovered when I started reading everything I could get my hands on about Vietnam. Many of the anti-war protesters were not as much for peace as for communism, and their voices were part of the strategy North Vietnam used to win the war.

In a 1995 interview published in the Wall Street Journal, North Vietnam Gen. Bui Tin, who received the unconditional surrender of South Vietnam on April 30, 1975, revealed that the Left and its "anti-war" movement caused America to lose by sapping its will to fight. Talking to Stephen Young, a Minnesota attorney and human rights activist who interviewed him in Hanoi, Bui Tin, who after the war became the editor of the People's Daily, the newspaper of communist Vietnam, quoted Vietnamese communist leader Ho Chi Minh: "We don't need to win military victories; we only need to hit them until they give up and get out.”

Young asked if the anti-war movement was important to Hanoi's victory. Bui replied: "It was essential to our strategy. Support for the war from our rear was completely secure while the American rear was vulnerable. Every day our leadership would listen to world news over the radio at 9 a.m. to follow the growth of the American anti-war movement. Visits to Hanoi by people like Jane Fonda and former Atty. Gen. Ramsey Clark and ministers gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses.”

Teaching living history also helped prevent teachers from leaving out uncomfortable facts about the Right. In doing research for a paper on the civil rights movement, I talked to a woman who had grown up in my hometown of Washington, D.C. I asked her about the downtown area of the city, which had been a bustling shopping hub in the Eisenhower era. She told me she didn’t know that area well because she and the other black people were not allowed to shop down there. Black people had their own neighborhood, the famed “Black Broadway”of U Street.

This was my native city, and I could walk through it and witness the places this woman described. To this day, I still think of her when I’m in that part of town.

By the time our class got to the American Revolution, I had a firm grasp on why the founding had been so important. The main theme throughout history was that people always try to control and enslave others, either through brute force or ideology or the claim of the divine right of kings. Although imperfectly at first and for many years after, America changed that. It had been something of a miracle, and it would be far too easy to lose its freedoms in the name of “progress.”

Knowing our rights, knowing how many people had died for them — from Bunker Hill to Ho Chi Min city — gives a citizen an appreciation for history that is missed if all that is offered is a cold recitation of facts and dates.

If you want to foster engaged young citizens, start their history with the election of Donald Trump . Invite speakers for and against him. Have them freely read everything they want and forbid censorship. Then start going backward.

Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of  The Devil' s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi . He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.