Posted on 06/04/2002 9:22:48 AM PDT by Stand Watch Listen
"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. But unfortunately young Americans are oblivious to their heritage. Ignorance of our past has been carefully cultivated by the educational establishment and the result is a cut-flower generation, severed from its roots.
The recently released survey of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) often referred to 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. And the NAEP results are only the latest indication that America's schools aren't teaching America's history.
In a 1999 survey of seniors at 55 of the best U.S. colleges and universities, only 23 percent correctly identified James Madison as the principal framer of the Constitution. Almost 80 percent earned grades of "D" or "F" on a high-school level American-history test.
On July 4, 1999, an enterprising reporter for the San Francisco Examiner asked teens at local malls about their understanding of the significance of Independence Day. One maintained the holiday was related to 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 great hereafter, the soldiers of the Continental Army who froze to death in the snows of 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 that there's no time for our own. At its 2001 convention, the National Education Association passed resolutions supporting multicultural education and global education. Absent was any suggestion that students should receive an American education.
When they absolutely must teach something about the United States, educrats prefer niche history the experiences of African-, Asian- and Hispanic-Americans. The idea of E pluribus unum (Out of many, one) is anathema to them. Teaching American history our common story as opposed to group-identity history is rejected as Eurocentric and jingoistic.
This mind-set was displayed at a forum of the National Council for Social Studies, as reported in the Weekly Standard of May 6. The council represents 26,000 teachers of history, social studies and related subjects. 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 and 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 than most. Theirs is a highly truncated version of the American saga consisting of slavery, the dispossession of the 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, and the heroic sacrifices of the World War II generation are nothing to them.
Ronald Reagan warned, "If we forget what we did, we won't know who we are." We'll be like amnesia victims wandering aimlessly about, wondering what it all means. Reagan charged "the eradication of American memory" inevitably will lead to "an erosion of the American spirit."
"United We Stand," proclaims the bumper sticker that still festoons cars. But how long will we stand so, when our young don't know who we are, how we got here or what we represent?
Don Feder writes editorials for the Boston Herald and is a syndicated columnist.
Dan
Here's an excerpt from Richard Halliburton's "Seven League Boots" a 1935 book from the famous explorer where he visits Soviet Russia and has the party's aims explained:
"The family must go next. Family unity is a capitalistic and bourgeois custom dangerous to Communism. Our children must be taught to spy on their parents and testify against them. Our men and women must be able to love who they please; to marry and divorce on impulse. Our state will care for their unwanted offspring, and do it better than the parents."
frankly, this is almost a carbon copy of extreme leftist thought here today, no question about it.
"Money," they said, "is the source of all evil. Money was the support of the gentry and intelligentsia. We must destroy all private wealth, all private property, and all means of accumulating it, lest these old classes come back."
Quenching free enterprise has come a long way here, though through sheer incompetence or design I cannot say. I tend towards the former usually, but in my more uncharitable moments, the latter.
"We must use every means in our power to protect our new theories and our new liberated masses from foreign capitalistic influences. No information, no counter-revolutionary englightenment must come in from the world outside. No newspapers or magazines that might reveal the false happiness and prosperity of other people living under the enemy's system will be tolerated. The movies, the theater, the radio, must be rigorously censored and adjusted. Nothing must emerge that does not glorify the working man and damn the other classes."
Interestingly, the internet has provided a secure means to disseminate information outside the "approved" channels and is probably a good part of the reason that conservative thought is making some good steam after years of neglect.
The more multicultural America becomes, the less relevent the history of America's first 200 years, it's formative, defining era, will be.
What America will become after that is anyone's guess.
There's another way these soldiers could look at it: We fought to save a country that would prove so strong that it could survive even though half its citizens were as dumb as rocks. That's quite an achievement.
"The design problem here is to improve the planning, financing and delivery of health and human services so they will more effectively support student learning. Specifically, we aim to produce a design that will assure that all children will enter school ready to learn and that none will fail to learn because of health, family or other problems that effective human services could have prevented. This means assuring the availability of integrated, comprehensive services, beginning with prenatal care, and including continuing health care, family support services, child care and preschool education. It will also mean assuring that teachers will be able to mobilize services and supports for the child and family when they spot a child who needs help. And it means that the supports--before and after school care, safe recreational opportunities and strong links between school and home--are in place."
Proposal for Restructuring Education for the State of Washington, National Council on Education and the Economy
And obviously absent is any suggestion that the NEA is entitled to be called an American organization. Their influence needs to be removed from local public school administrations. If it cannot be removed, citizens should respond by not funding public education. Anything is better than inflicting their sick agenda on America's youth.
For those interested in better understanding where these anti-American educators are coming from, see Myths & Myth Makers In American "Higher" Education. Their resolutions and general antics are no accident. They are part of a two generation long assault on our normal patterns of identification and allegiance.
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
We had one poor guy from Chicago who wasn't doing too hot on any of his leaders up and down the chain. Finally, in exasperation, the Colonel asked him "Who's the Vice President of the United States??" Him -- 'Uh... Bush? (He was currently the President)
I'm sure he had a good working knowledge on "Lifelong Learning" and other feel good fluff and nonsense essential to a dumbed down, helmet wearing four cylinder driving limp wristed society.
My kids are both grown now. They did get around to American History in 5th grade, but yes, as an avid history buff I spent a lot of time teaching my kids about American History and and the benefits of capitalism, something the socialists who run the schools couldn't teach even if they wanted to, having never participated in it.
That is an excellent analogy of the kids coming out of our dumbed down, Marxist indoctrinating schools.
Sometimes he appears to have a liberal bias but on the whole he seems okay to me.
Other additional tapes I have
Theodore Roosevelt, by A&E Network
The World At War, 9 tapes on WWII
The Century, on the 20th Century
The Century might have liberal bias but I'm sure a Freeper can handle re-education their kids about that subject.
I trust you're teaching your son at home now...?
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