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There's some debate going on about Obama across the web and whether what he advocates is really best for America.
On the education front, Victor David Hanson said this, first quoting Obama:
“He said schools should do a better job of teaching all students African-American history "because that's part of American history," as well as women's struggle for equality, the history of unions, the role of Hispanics in U.S. and other matters that he suggested aren't given enough attention.”
"I want us to have a broad-based history" taught in schools, he said, even including more on "the Holocaust as well as other issues of oppression" around the world.”
But anyone familiar with the historical illiteracy of today’s college student understands that more of the “oppression” history that Sen. Obama is advocating is precisely the problem, not the solution. Our high school students already know who Harriet Tubman is, but not U.S. Grant or Shiloh. They have been introduced to Crispus Attucks, but not Alexander Hamilton. They know World War II largely as the Japanese internment and Hiroshima (cf. Reverend Wright on that), but have not a clue about the Bulge or Okinawa or the Munich travesty.
In other words, it is precisely this pick-and-choose therapeutic curriculum of "oppression" history presented as a melodrama of winners (white male Christian capitalists) and losers (women, people of color, the working classes) that has ensured an entire generation of historical illiterates, who can’t distinguish between the profound and trivial, or identify basic names, dates, and places to ground even their politically-correct views. They are told to remember and repeat that Hiroshima is bad, but not why or how it occurred, what were the alternatives, and what were the consequences in a war of bad and worse choices.
Instead the sins innate to mankind—war, oppression, slavery, bias, etc.—are nearly always presented as sins unique to the West in general, or to America in particular. We hear always of commission, never of the remediation, always of our terrible past, never of the pretty awful present that goes on outside the United States.
What we need from a healer at this late date is not advocacy for more gripe-history that tries to portion out equal victim status to various competing constituencies under the guise of multicultural brotherhood, but rather tries, in holistic and inclusive fashion, to explain both the noble and tragic history of the United States, an experiment that was and is not perfect, but still very good and preferable to all the alternatives.
Now I'm only an American by fluke of birth (my parents were at Harvard when I was born). Really my whole family is Canadian, and we live in Canada and homeschool in Canada. But my girls know a ton of American history because IT IS IMPORTANT. It is key to understanding the West, to understanding human rights, to understanding liberty and even classic liberalism.
This pick and choose history that so many advocate is not really history at all. It doesn't teach the kids to see things in its context. My kids know the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence and the preamble to the Constitution and the Federalist - Anti-Federalist debate. And they're only 10 and 13! They also know about the Holocaust and women's suffrage and slavery. But they know it in context. If all you teach is oppression, how will kids ever learn how unique America is?
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Posted by Dana @ School For Us 