AMERICAN HISTORY PUSHED ASIDE
Typically, things happen for a reason.
It's all cause and effect.
Like the consequences demonstrated in a federal report, from the Department of Education, saying that graduating high school seniors in the United States have virtually no knowledge of American history.
I suspect that has happened for a reason. I suspect it is the natural outcome of a generation of education that has debased fact and enthroned philosophy. We have studied political correctness and ignored history. Worse, we have ridiculed and attacked history, teaching an ignorant contempt for the Republic and its origins.
We don't know who the Founding Fathers were, but we know who they oppressed. Washington and Jefferson are question marks in most people's minds, but almost every high schooler can tell you that they owned slaves. And that America slaughtered the Indians, and drove the buffalo almost to extinction, and stole the Panama Canal.
Most people are taught to have pride in their heritage, in America we are taught to be ashamed of it. American students aren't taught to value the past, they are taught to change the future. The clear lesson of the American classroom is that the past is bad and must be escaped.
Is it any wonder that -- according to the Department of Education -- 57 percent of new high school graduates don't have even the most rudimentary understanding of American history? Thirty-two percent have a "substandard" knowledge and 10 percent have a knowledge described as "at grade level." Just one percent of high school seniors has "advanced" knowledge of American history.
It would be a rare high school graduate who could tell you anything substantive about John Adams. Or Meriwether Lewis, Hyman Rickover, Clara Barton, Dolly Madison, Crispus Attucks, Jefferson Davis, Jack Pershing, Henry Clay, William Tecumsah Sherman, George Marshall, Grover Cleveland or Luther Burbank.
Yet virtually every student would know Rosa Parks.
Which is not to say anything negative about Mrs. Parks, but it is a blazing indictment of American education. While accusing history of being subjective and biased, today's classroom is as subjective and biased as possible.
Students don't learn history, they learn an agenda.
And the fruit of that is a rising generation of Americans who have -- as this study shows -- absolutely no understanding at all of their heritage and birthright.
The study will be seen by most as a negative reflection on students. It shouldn't. This says nothing about students. They learn what they are taught, and it is clear they are being taught nothing. The fault for this lies with those who determine educational policy and content. The big thinkers of American education have betrayed the American people. Those who set the agenda and train the teachers and write the curriculla have subverted our schools as a tool against us.
The anti-American liberals moved into education, and this is what you get.
It's all cause and effect.
- by Bob Lonsberry © 2012
