There are so many things wrong with American education that one hardly knows where to begin. But the failure to teach American history must rank near the top. In an important article, Bill Bennett points out that our children do worse in American history than they do in reading or math. That strikes me as pretty amazing, and depressing. Bennett gives examples of what textbooks teach (usually in a boring manner) and don't teach.
Who knows that America’s war against Islamist terror did not begin on September 11, 2001, but that Thomas Jefferson fought our first war on terror, against Muslim slave traders in North Africa who had enslaved some 1.25 million Europeans some 200 years earlier? Children are not taught this.
To remedy our huge knowledge-of-history deficiency, he suggests:
Let us call for a renewal. Begin with the texts. Let us have a national contest sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities or the Department of Education for better history textbooks, and grant the
winners emoluments and recognition. Judges should be award-winning teachers, tour guides, National Park Rangers, and parents — all of whom are known to love their subject. There really is no good reason for a dulled down history. As [Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David] McCullough put it, to take what was once “a source of infinite pleasure” and make it “boring,” “is a crime.”
Bennett has other suggestions as well, such as replacing the picture of George Washington currently on our dollar bills with one by Jean-Antoine Houdon which depicts Washington as "a virile man at the height of his physical and mental powers."
Bennett asks why stories about great Americans such as those recounted in excellent biographies by writers such as Walter Isaacson, David McCullough, and Joseph Ellis are not recounted in textbooks. He asks why Frederick Douglass and others do not receive the attention they deserve.
He cites the sobering warning of Ronald Reagan:
In his farewell address to the nation, the large-minded amateur historian President Ronald Reagan warned of what we see in our nation’s report card today, saying “If we forget what we did, we won't know who we are. I'm warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit.” How much more dangerous is this now, as we fight a war for our very existence and expect young Americans to sign up and fight for a country and way of life worthy of their own lives? In the long run, why will future Americans want to stand up and fight for a country they do not even know — a country in which they are born aliens? How do we ask them to fight, and perhaps die, for a country they do not know?
Futher:
Our history is full of controversy, suffering, struggling, overcoming, and winning. There is no reason to elevate its failings at the expense of its successes, nor is there reason to ignore its failings or, worse, turn it into a snooze-fest. The task is to tell the truth — but can we not do so in an interesting, lively, and glorious way — the way I know and have seen some teachers do?
Finally, on the great romance that is American History:
The great adventurer Bernard DeVoto once wrote to Catherine Drinker Bowen about why her task as a historian was so important:
If the mad, impossible voyage of Columbus or Cartier or La Salle or Coronado or John Ledyard is not romantic, if the stars did not dance in the sky when our Constitutional Convention met, if Atlantis has any landscape stranger or the other side of the moon any lights or colors or shapes more unearthly than the customary homespun of Lincoln and the morning coat of Jackson, well, I don’t know what romance is.
Indeed. Our history is all that and more, much more. America was, is, and — we hope — will continue to be the place where, more than any place else, dreams actually do come true. It is, as Abraham Lincoln described it, “the last best hope of earth.” But to live that dream, to know what hope we convey, and to teach it from generation to generation, we must describe it, appreciate it, and learn to fall in love with it all over again. Thankfully, historical amnesia still has a cure. Let us begin the regimen now.
Bennett has himself authored a two-vlume survey of American history: America: The Last Best Hope.