Wandering around with historical amnesia

Don Feder's op-ed piece in today's Washington Times explains what has happened to American history education in public schools:

Schools are so busy telling everyone else's story, there's no time for our own. At its 2001 convention, the National Education Association passed resolutions supporting multicultural education and global education. Absent was any suggestion that students should receive an American education.

When they absolutely must teach something about the United States, educrats prefer niche history — the experiences of African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans.

The idea of e pluribus unum (out of many, one) is anathema to them. Teaching American history — our common story — as opposed to group-identity history, is rejected as ethnocentric and jingoistic.

This mindset was displayed at a forum of the National Council for Social Studies, as reported in the Weekly Standard of May 6. The council represents 26,000 teachers of history, social studies and related subjects.

To a teacher who said that in the wake of September 11, her students wanted to know more about their nation's past, a panelist responded: "We need to de-exceptionalize the United States. We're just another country and another group of people."

Ronald Reagan warned, "If we forget what we did, we won't know who we are." (We'll be like amnesia victims wandering aimlessly about, wondering what it all means.) Mr. Reagan charged "the eradication of American memory" will inevitably lead to "an erosion of the American spirit."

I don't think that Mr. Feder's criticisms are equally valid for all schools. In my son's middle school Tennessee history is taken in 7th grade. Every student must complete a major project about Alvin C. York, to whom Marshal Ferdinand Foch declared, "What you did was the greatest thing accomplished by any private soldier of all the armies of Europe."

On the other hand, this is also a school where a history teacher decided that the way to study ancient China was to put a videotape of Mulan in the VCR, turn down the lights and leave the room. And another history teacher declared - not as a debatable proposition but as a matter of fact - that Andrew Jackson was no different than Hitler. (If you don't know why then there is hope for you yet. If you do why, then maybe you . . . well, I won't say it.)

Come to think of it, Feder is probably right pretty much across the board.