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Townhall...
Who Owns History?
By Mona Charen
9/30/2011
The Southern Poverty Law Center is appalled by the results of a new
study finding that states are not teaching the history of the civil
rights era. The SPLC, which commissioned the study of state curricula,
concludes that students in at least 35 states are missing out on
important facts about our history. And even in states that include
units on civil rights, “their civil rights education boils down to two
people and four words: Rosa Parks, Dr. King and ‘I have a dream.’”
On one hand, you want to welcome disgruntled liberals to the club of
those worried about historical amnesia among the young. We
conservatives have been worrying about it for decades. On the other
hand, it’s tough to believe that American students are being cheated of
knowledge about civil rights, compared with say, knowledge about World
War II, or the progressive movement or the nullification crisis. One of
my sons, who has been educated in public schools most of his life,
offered that in his experience, American history is taught as “the
Revolution, the internment of the Japanese during World War II and the
civil rights movement.”
When Common Core, an advocacy group for educational standards, surveyed
American teenagers in 2008, they found that nearly a quarter were not
able to correctly identify Adolf Hitler, but 97 percent knew who
delivered the “I have a dream” speech. Care to speculate about how many
would know who Joseph Stalin was?
Teaching history is inevitably a somewhat political act -- which is why
an effort during the 1990s to establish national standards foundered in
acrimony and bitterness. Some textbooks in wide use in America devote
pages and pages to the so-called “McCarthy era” while neglecting much
else and are written in a tone of condescension toward our forebears.
Fights over textbook content in leading states like Texas have become
protracted tugs of war between competing visions of our nation.
One suspects that only Howard Zinn’s version of history would meet with
the approval of the SPLC, and there are perhaps some on the right who
might want to airbrush Joe McCarthy out altogether. But if we cannot
come to some meeting of the minds on teaching the fundamentals of our
history, we will have a drastically diminished future. The National
Assessment of Educational Progress found in 2010 that only 12 percent
of high school seniors were proficient in history...
Read the rest of the column at Townhall
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