Keep Right — Column by Ralph K. Ginorio
Twenty years ago, my then-School District’s Curriculum Director asked me what purpose any history courses served in the contemporary world. Believe me that I was just thrilled to be working for someone with this mindset.
History is useless if unremembered. For history to be of use, a person must be able to recall moments of wisdom and folly from past crises that can be used to navigate to a positive outcome. History is social memory, allowing us to leaven our personal wisdom by learning from the failures and successes of others.
History tells each of us who we are. It is history, rather than race or sex, which most strongly shapes our own identity. In addition to who we are as discrete people, we inherit and absorb a cultural self. Two identical twins would be fundamentally different people were they separated after being born; one raised in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho and the other in Krasnodar, Russia or in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
We swim in a sea of culture convictions, language, manners, faith, and norms that are essentially different depending on where on Earth we grow up. Everything, from what is normal to what constitutes common sense, is determined by the history that formed the society where the individual develops.
This is why historical education matters. It tells us wisdom from folly. More significantly, it tells us who we are as individuals and as citizens of a distinct nation.
Public schools were established across the United States in the late 1800s precisely because our national identity was threatened by mass immigration. Mandatory public education was entrusted with the critical mission of acculturating the children of immigrants from all over the world. “E PLURIBUS UNUM” was our educational priority, to make one nation of many physical and cultural bloodlines.
Our educational trendsetters have betrayed this imperative. Fidelity to the transmission of our common values, the standards of our mainstream culture, and the fundamental characteristics of the Judeo-Christian West to coming generations is now mischaracterized as intolerant and even bigoted.
The inevitable result of this rejection of our schools’ acculturating mission is today’s cultural confusion. Can any of us say with any confidence what virtues, manners, and characteristics remain definitively American?
Without functional shared core beliefs, no society long remains cohesive. Without common understandings about how and why our Federal Republic should function, free citizens will fail to maintain liberty. Individuals without historical perspective cannot long resist the siren song of the demagogue.
The legacy of the West is the basis of the very modern world. The value of the individual, inalienable rights, limited government, separation of powers, dedication to civic duty, rulers held to account according to a transcendent morality, freedom of religion so that we each may discover God, freedom of speech which guarantees cultural vibrancy as well as technological innovation, freedom to bear arms in defense of all of these others: all of these and many more are utterly unique to the West.
From Abraham to Bonhoeffer, from Pericles to Reagan, from Socrates to Karl Barth, from Archimedes to Einstein, from Homer to J.R.R. Tolkien, and from Sophocles to Clint Eastwood, our shared Judeo-Christian Western Civilization alone arose from the Middle Ages and created modernity.
None of this can make the least bit of sense to anyone without a working understanding of our shared Western heritage. Unless we are taught to remember who we are as Americans, we will cease to be American.
