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I agree with you on the part about making sure they know the pitfalls, but, speaking as the father of an 11 year-old in public school, little if any time is spent discussing how "special" America is. Most of the social studies time is devoted to talking about how bad we are, and how bad we treated everyone on our way to establishing the greatest country on the face of the earth. I help my daughter with her studies, and get a chance to read some of the textbooks, and I also drop in to class every once in a while. "America is special" isn't being taught.

And therein lies the problem...

I agree with you on the part about making sure they know the pitfalls, but, speaking as the father of an 11 year-old in public school, little if any time is spent discussing how "special" America is. Most of the social studies time is devoted to talking about how bad we are, and how bad we treated everyone on our way to establishing the greatest country on the face of the earth. I help my daughter with her studies, and get a chance to read some of the textbooks, and I also drop in to class every once in a while. "America is special" isn't being taught.

I absolutely agree with this. If you're going to go over what's wrong you need to emphasize that it's just a tiny part of the overall good. For instance capitalism has fantastic ecological consequences but that's only because capitalism produces so much wealth and well-being for its citizens. I think in many ways the more liberal school systems fall into the big media trap of only focusing on the negatives and overlooking the plusses much as they're doing in Iraq right now. And I also think it's important to stress that this isn't necessarilly the case in all or even the majority of the school systems. I'm a recent product of a public education and I can state, quite certainly, that I was given a healthy dose of respect for what went wrong but also a great sense of pride in our achomplishments and in overcomming those wrongs. Given the passion of American's and how the polls over fundamental issues on patriotism, god, and country diverge so radically with the liberal media I have cause to believe I'm not alone :) (I do have a few issues with my spelling, punctuation, and grammer instructors however ;)

But I do think I should point out that your post is fundamentally wrong on at least one point... I think you should re-read the last few sentences of your post again...

I help my daughter with her studies, and get a chance to read some of the textbooks, and I also drop in to class every once in a while. "America is special" isn't being taught.

If you look carefully you'll see "America is special" is being taught quite well :)

...speaking as the father of an 11 year-old in public school, little if any time is spent discussing how "special" America is. Most of the social studies time is devoted to talking about how bad we are, and how bad we treated everyone on our way to establishing the greatest country on the face of the earth..."America is special" isn't being taught. And therein lies the problem...

Yeah.
And if yer not part of the solution, yer part of the problem.
Get your little girl out of the cesspool now - before it's too late.

Right. The pendulum has swung way too far to the left, and an honest appraisal of history will take a lot of undoing of the wacky leftist approached given for 30 years.