History sets the stage for the future?

Mark Greathouse

(8/2020) News media deluge us with seemingly endless reports of destruction of monuments dedicated to people that have been part of American history. It’s ironic that mostly uneducated anarchists can try to erase the visible evidence but not the indelible history underlying those memorials. The latest phrase added to our lexicon has been "cancel culture." Any thought, word, or symbol that offends a certain sliver of our population must be cancelled. It offers up shades of George Orwell’s dystopian novel "1984" set in a culture of perpetual war, constant population surveillance, and manipulation of history through use of mind-bending techniques like doublethink, thoughtcrime, and Newspeak. Its real-world parallels are communism, socialism, and totalitarianism.

In an era of digital image alteration, students of history might reflect on how Soviet dictator Josef Stalin erased images of his victims from official photographs via air-brushing. How many readers knew that? Why is knowing about it important?

How many "millennials" today can tell you what nation the 13 American colonies sought independence from in 1776? How many Americans today can tell you when the Homestead Act was passed and what it did? How many folks can tell which U.S. President defeated the Barbary pirates of Tripoli thereby protecting our trading interests? The answers: not many at all.

Why don’t people know the answers? Why are such things important to know? Well, for one thing, they supposedly reek of – omigosh – American exceptionalism. For another, history has been relegated to a subset of "social studies," a convenient cover term to hide most sins of omission. Social studies lump together civics and government, economics, geography, student interpersonal skills, and – ta daaa! – history. A 2014 report by the National Assessment of Educational Progress noted that only 18 percent of American high schoolers were proficient in history. Further reports estimate that nearly 90 percent of teachers consider teaching history a low priority.

Who am I to judge the importance of history? Is it enough to for me to have a couple of college degrees? Does serving on a local school board (one year as president) as well as teaching business for 8 years as an adjunct professor at a local college give me some sort of credentials? How about my being a long-time student of history – and those other things stuffed under the "social studies" umbrella? Notably, most of those college students I taught couldn’t wrap a shred of historical context around what they were studying.

As a corporate business executive and later an equity investor, deep diving into the financial and operational history of businesses was a key part of due diligence and an essential part of strategizing for the future. I expect we could call studying our nation’s or the world’s history part of our due diligence for planning our lives. After all, we dare not ignore philosopher George Santayana’s sage advice, "Those who do not know history’s mistakes are doomed to repeat them."

I contend that studying history equips us to be discerning in life. Without enabling discernment, we just might produce the sort of useful idiots that tear down monuments or try to "cancel" perceived mistakes embedded in our history. To wit, it is an essential requisite of our education system to educate our youth in history and to promote its fullest discussion and understanding.

So, can students receive a fair and unbiased history education in today’s schools? As a school board member, I was one of two of nine board members that fully reviewed a new curriculum. Copies were available for review by the public, parents, other board members, but none were ever checked out. The new curriculum reflected the horrific one-size-fits-all, antiquated, philosophy of what were called "Common Core Standards." We later put the brakes on the Common Core, but that’s another story. In reviewing the 2-inch thick curriculum document, I found an overwhelming number of errors and distortions.

One standout example defined the U.S. Constitution’s establishment clause as "The establishment clause established religion." What college-degreed educator wrote that tripe? Anyone with a cursory knowledge of the Constitution would know that the establishment clause forbid Congress from making laws establishing religion. The curriculum further sought to dull any reference to what might be inferred as "American exceptionalism." It was premised on America never being great. The revised curriculum was reviewed with school administrators, revised, and eventually approved unanimously by board members. One could only pray that implementation would go better than its creation.

How did something like Common Core emerge from the swampy creepy depths of elite academia? How have socialist historian Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States or Robin Diangelo’s White Fragility crept in? It’s not that they should be ignored; but should they be emphasized? Some might call it censorship to not study Zinn or Diangelo. However, if an environment of informed debate is in place, those two outliers can be put into a larger context without denigrating our nation’s exceptional history. How else but through history study would students be able to ascertain that something like the New York Times "1619 Project" is based on pseudo-history?

We have many great teachers stuck in a truly archaic system the basis of which was developed more than 150 years ago by socialist John Dewey. (Check your history!) There are mostly concerned well-intended parents, and it’s tough to tell them that the education system they trust their children to stinks. You’d have to be hiding under a rock not to see reports of how U.S. education compares terribly with other developed nations. How is that perpetuated? Look to the teacher unions and politicians (both major political parties!). Then look to parents who’ve been sucked in by the education establishment messaging.

Is there a solution? Yes. Save our nation’s future by teaching more history. Our fight in America today is far more a cultural war than a political war. Our children must be taught what freedom is by studying history, and they just might learn how to be exceptional human beings in the process.

In case you’re wondering, the American colonies sought independence in 1776 from Britain and King George III; the Homestead Act of 1862 gave away more than 160 million acres of public land free to 1.6 million homesteaders.; and Thomas Jefferson sent the Marines to defeat Tripoli’s state-sponsored Barbary pirates. Sidebar: The pirates were responsible for selling more than a million captive Europeans into slavery in North Africa between 1530 and 1780.

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