Keep Right — Column by Ralph K. Ginorio
There are certainly exceptions to everything that I am about to say regarding the sorry state of historical education in our K-12 schools. Good teachers, administrators, and schools do exist. I hope that I am one of them.
However, my thirty years as an educator inform me that what I am about to contend here below is the overwhelming norm within contemporary American education. In most cases, American students are being taught to despair in order to profit the political Left.
The fundamental purpose of establishing mandatory public education in the late 1800s was to acculturate the children of immigrants from countless lands into becoming distinctly culturally American. This worked splendidly for a century, from the mid-late 1800s through the mid-late 1900s.
Then, a cultural demolition was perpetrated by Marxists-by-any-other-name to demonize and discredit that very same distinct American culture. This civilizational self-loathing has since made sufficient inroads into mainstream colleges, teacher training programs, and American public schools to turn acculturation into anti-American indoctrination.
To the extent that many educators or educational leaders even consider teaching history, they overwhelmingly do so as an exercise in self-flagellation. America’s crimes are taught out-of-context as common examples of structural racism and hypocritical cruelty. The explicit moral of this kind of history is that the United States in particular, and Judeo-Christian Western Civilization in general, are irredeemably guilty of a unique class of crimes against humanity.
Implicit in all of this is to teach that the proper attitude of Americans should be abject shame. Children, adolescents, and teenagers are taught that they bear a hereditary stain of guilt that can only be expiated by an unconditional surrender of everything that is distinctly American to its enemies, both foreign and domestic. Impressionable innocents are being taught that they are the heirs of a monstrous legacy which should rightly blight any hopes and dreams they might have for their future.
This Agit-Prop masquerading as education is nothing less than an abuse committed against students, parents, and even America itself. It does real harm to kids and teens, spreading an undeserved sense of culpability to students who have themselves done nothing wrong.
Of course, the story of chattel slavery in the Antebellum South is the classic example of this. Absolutely no student in any American school ever met anyone who owned slaves or who was themselves a slave within the American South. Yet, each student is taught that this is the most important characteristic of our society.
Furthermore, slavery is taught so poorly that most American students implicitly believe that all slaves everywhere were black and all slave owners were Southern whites; that the United States is uniquely guilty of enslaving human beings. This is an absolute lie.
Slavery in a variety of forms was practiced by every human society on Earth that engaged in farming. Slaves of every color and culture were owned by people of every color and culture. Between the discovery of farming 10,000 years ago and the Industrial Revolution in late 1700s Britain, all agrarian societies worldwide needed from 70% to 95% of their population working to produce food for the remaining 30% to 5%. Otherwise, there would have been no craftsmen, merchants, soldiers, priests, scholars, or noblemen.
This enslavement was accomplished within religious and legal strictures that bound most human beings to lives of farm labor. Most of our ancestors were mere means to our overlords’ ends.
The Slave Coast of Sub-Saharan Africa was, itself, among the worst of history’s slaving societies. There, native Africans were captured, exploited, bought, and sold by other native Africans. Today, Saudi Arabia still engages in a slave trade of black Africans.
What is unique about the Judeo-Christian West is that, in developing industry, it freed humanity from the need to enslave other human beings. No force in human history has been more effective at ending slavery than the British Empire. We in the United States fought our bloodiest war to preserve the Union, which in the end could only be done by freeing the slaves. In the 1960s, when the United States was arguably at its apogee of wealth and power, we ripped out our society’s guts in struggles to replace Jim Crow with Civil Rights for all.
What makes us unique is, therefore, not that some of our ancestors once owned slaves. What is unique about the English-speaking peoples is that we are almost alone in having moved Heaven and Earth to end slavery.
None of this is taught as a fundamental part of standard historical curricula in the vast majority of U. S. schools. Instead of a rightful pride in our American exceptionalism, students are taught to feel shame.
Most Educational Administrators are not true believers in this “1619 Project” style propaganda. They simply have no idea about why history should even be taught in anything like a systematic fashion within our schools.
History is not a “life skill”, nor does it have the allure of being strictly of the 21st Century. It is not reducible to a data set that can easily be modelled, measured, and manipulated. No well-funded lobby is funding grants for the reintroduction of a high standard of objective history into our schools. Most importantly, history contradicts the Woke dogma of the moment.
Until Conservatives, Libertarians, traditionalists, and old-style patriotic Liberals reclaim control over our schools from the Marxists and their Fellow Travelers, American students will continue to be victimized to serve Leftist political agendas.
Any restoration will require many more of us, who are not of their lockstep mindset, to become involved parents and citizens, teachers, school administrators, school board members, and education professors. Only then will most students learn whom we truly are as Americans, and be properly free to think for themselves.
