Not knowing history is worse than ignorance of math, literature or almost anything else. Ignorance of history is undermining Western society's ability to talk straight and think straight.All of that is critical to a successful representative republic. Ignorant masses invite and accept despots.
A girl in (my son's high school) English class praised the Vietnam War-era draft dodgers: "If I'd lived at that time and been drafted," she said, "I would've gone to Canada too."....and she (will soon) votes and is interviewed by MTV News.....
I thought she was merely endorsing the anti-war position. But my son set me straight. This student actually believed that if she had lived at the time, she might have been drafted. She didn't understand that conscription in the United States has always applied to males only.
Our schools teach history ideologically. They teach the message, not the truth. ... They are propaganda machines.By design and encouragement. When you get a chance, read the major high school history books.
Ignorance of history destroys our judgment. Consider Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill), who just compared the Guantanamo Bay detention center to Stalin's gulag and to the death camps of Hitler and Pol Pot — an astonishing, obscene piece of ignorance. Between 15 million and 30 million people died from 1918 through 1956 in the prisons and labor camps of the Soviet gulag.I can't say that, but Mr. Gelernter can.
...college students who have heard of President Kennedy but not of anything he ever did except get assassinated. They have never heard JFK's inaugural promise: that America would "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to ensure the survival and the success of liberty."JFK is one of the Presidents treated the worst by the "education" establishment. The only way to really know the man is to read his speeches. Everything else is an American version of
To forget your own history is (literally) to forget your identity. By teaching ideology instead of facts, our schools are erasing the nation's collective memory. As a result, some "expert" can go on TV and announce (20 minutes into the fighting) that Afghanistan, Iraq or wherever "is the new Vietnam" — and young people can't tell he is talking drivel.Powerful stuff. Simply powerful. On target-with secondaries.
There is an ongoing culture war between Americans who are ashamed of this nation's history and those who acknowledge with sorrow its many sins and are fiercely proud of it anyway.
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If you are proud of this country and don't want its identity to vanish, you must teach U.S. history to your children. They won't learn it in school. This nation's memory will go blank unless you act.
On a sidebar: You see this all the time in the military. One of my favorite things to do on a qualification board on deployment (word gets out fast) is to ask the young officer to (let's suppose a WestPAC deployment), "Go to the ink board and draw for me a map starting at
Who do I blame? I blame our Navy's officer accession programs, our parents, our national
One last thing; if you think
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