As an old History Major, I care deeply about this subject, but I also care about it for another reason: an understanding of our unique history has always been a vital source for the assimilation of our diverse children into an adult world of one people, and one nation. If we get this wrong, we jeopardize the ability of future generations to understand and use their heritage to forge the bonds of kinship they will need to work and live together as American citizens.
I am not alone in this thinking. None other than Ronald Reagan emphasized this point towards the end of his Farewell Address to the nation in early 1989, which I will quote here at length:
…Finally, there is a great tradition of warnings in Presidential farewells, and I’ve got one that’s been on my mind for some time. But oddly enough it starts with one of the things I’m proudest of in the past 8 years: the resurgence of national pride that I called, “The New Patriotism.” This national feeling is good, but it won’t count for much, and it won’t last unless it’s grounded in thoughtfulness and knowledge.
An informed patriotism is what we want. And are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world? Those of us who are over 35 or so years of age grew up in a different America. We were taught, very directly, what it means to be an American. And we absorbed, almost in the air, a love of country and an appreciation of its institutions. If you didn’t get these things from your family you got them from the neighborhood, from the father down the street who fought in Korea or the family who lost someone at Anzio. Or you could get a sense of patriotism from school. And if all else failed you could get a sense of patriotism from the popular culture. The movies celebrated democratic values and implicitly reinforced the idea that America was special. TV was like that, too, through the mid-sixties.
But now, we’re about to enter the nineties, and some things have changed. Younger parents aren’t sure that an unambivalent appreciation of America is the right thing to teach modern children. And as for those who create the popular culture, well-grounded patriotism is no longer the style. Our spirit is back, but we haven’t reinstitutionalized it. We’ve got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom — freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise. And freedom is special and rare. It’s fragile; it needs [protection].
So, we’ve got to teach history based not on what’s in fashion but what’s important…. …If we forget what we did, we won’t know who we are. I’m warning of an eradication of that — of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit. Let’s start with some basics: more attention to American history and a greater emphasis on civic ritual. …
…And that’s about all I have to say tonight, except for one thing. The past few days when I’ve been at that window upstairs, I’ve thought a bit of the ‘shining city upon a hill.’ The phrase comes from John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe the America he imagined. What he imagined was important because he was an early Pilgrim, an early freedom man. He journeyed here on what today we’d call a little wooden boat; and like the other Pilgrims, he was looking for a home that would be free. I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it, and see it still.
What Reagan is saying—what he understood instinctively and tried to drum into anyone who would listen to him for more than a generation—was that at the core of being an American there is a narrative—a narrative of a challenge, and of a story of how we’ve tried to meet that challenge—and if we ever lost or forgot the narrative, we would cease to be uniquely American.
Reagan called this narrative the story of “freedom”—but it is more than that. For, as those dissident European Protestants hit our shores in the early 1600s, they carried with them the challenge that Western Civilization had posed since the crucifixion: the challenge to balance the acceptance of the gift of liberty with the admonition to love our neighbor. They set out to build a society to meet that challenge—from families to neighborhoods and congregations to townships and counties to colonies and states—and then to build governments that would protect what they had built, rather than to create governments that would supersede and change their society. As the noted History professor, Fredrick Jackson Turner observed 90 years ago, while the challenge to modern Europe was “to create an artificial democratic order by legislation. The problem of the United States is not to create democracy, but to conserve democratic institutions and ideals.”
Did it always work? Did we always remember that liberty would require vigilance against building too strong a government? Did we always remember that liberty was to be universal, and was to be coupled with an individual responsibility to our neighbors? The answer to these questions is obviously “no,” but that is part of the story, too: how and why we failed; and how men and women kept challenging the status quo to make us live up to those “better angels of our nature.”
The debate in Austin so far has focused on the people and events that are included in the book, and when in the curriculum they should be discussed. But that debate is missing the forest from the trees. Many of the biographies of the people whom both sides are arguing over will support the teaching of the narrative, both as to what we did right, and as to what we did wrong and how we used our ideals to face those wrongs. It is not just the lives of specific people or recounting of historical events that must be taught and remembered, but it is the narrative in which those lives and events unfolded that must again be taught and remembered in our core if our children are to inherit that “shining city on a hill”.
What narrative do you think Obama learned about America as he grew up?
I rest my case.
If you care about this issue, don’t just sit back and let others decide how social studies will be taught—get involved. Sign up and go to Austin to testify, and let our elected officials know that our history is too important to our future to cede its writing to people who don’t understand, or who want to abandon, the narrative.
Click here to see the full Public Hearing Information from the Texas State Board of Education
