Posted on 05/27/2002 4:20:52 AM PDT by billorites
``Our ability to defend, intelligently and thoughtfully, what we as a nation hold dear depends on our knowledge and understanding of what we hold dear,'' says historian Diane Ravitch. A reasonable proposition, this.
Unfortunately, ignorance of our past has been carefully cultivated by the educational establishment. The result is a cut-flower generation, severed from its roots.
The new survey of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (known as the nation's report card) shows nearly 60 percent of high-school seniors lack even a basic knowledge of U.S. history.
Only 41 percent of 12th-graders know the Monroe Doctrine was intended to keep Europe out of the Americas. A bare 29 percent connect the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution with the Vietnam War.
This is the latest indication that America's schools aren't teaching America's history. In a 1999 survey of seniors at 55 of our best colleges and universities, almost 80 percent earned a D or F on a high-school level American history test.
On July 4, 1999, The Examiner in San Francisco asked teens at malls their understanding of the day's significance.
One said the holiday was about Pearl Harbor. A 17-year-old thoughtfully explained: ``They put some flag up. It's like the freedom. Some war was fought and we won, so we got our freedom.'' Somewhere in the hereafter, the Continental soldiers who froze to death at Valley Forge and the GIs who died in the steaming jungles of Bataan must be weeping.
This epidemic of ignorance is due in part to a crowding-out effect.
Schools are so busy telling everyone else's story there's no time for our own. Last year, the National Education Association passed resolutions supporting multicultural education and global education. Absent was any suggestion for an American education.
When they absolutely must teach something about the United States, educrats prefer niche history - the experiences of African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Hispanic-Americans. The idea of e pluribus unum (out of many, one) is anathema to them. Teaching U.S. history - our common story - as opposed to group-identity history is rejected as ethnocentric and jingoistic.
This mindset was displayed at a forum of the National Council for Social Studies, as reported in The Weekly Standard of May 6. To a teacher who said that in the wake of Sept. 11, her students wanted to know more about their nation's past, a panelist responded: ``We need to de-exceptionalize the United States. We're just another country and another group of people.''
Truly, as Yogi Berra would say, only in America. Only here do our elites cringe at the thought of teaching students that there's something special and unique about their homeland. They are traitors of the heart - John Walker Lindhs of the spirit.
It's not even that they think we're no better than other people, but that we're considerably worse. Theirs is a highly truncated American saga, consisting of slavery, the dispossession of Indians and the Vietnam War through the eyes of Jane Fonda.
The struggle of the settlers to build a new civilization, the genius of the Founding Fathers reflected in the Constitution, the greatness of Abraham Lincoln, the contributions to humanity of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, the heroic sacrifices of the World War II generation, all are nothing to them.
Ronald Reagan warned, ``the eradication of American memory'' will inevitably lead to ``an erosion of the American spirit.''
``United We Stand,'' the bumper stickers proclaim. But how long will we stand so, when our young don't know who we are, how we got here or what we represent?
I was given the benefit of an incredibly good education, and at the end of this week, I will be graduating from highschool, with my best subject being American History.
When I lived in Italy, I learned Italian history. When I was in Germany, I learned German history. And when I was stationed in Australia, I learned Australian history. How can one understand a people and their culture without studying their history??? Now I was just a lowly GI, not a panelist on some high-falutin' committee, but it's kind of obvious that this guy/gals an idiot. If we're just another country and another group of people, how can you explain our politics, reaction to world events, culture, etc without a historical look at "this group of people"???
The current generation is the foundation of the new America. And this situation is no accident.
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