Mount Rushmore, Fallen History Curriculum, Disunited America

It’s not surprising that yesterday’s Rapid City Journal would begin its headline article with a statewide problem about the teaching of history:  “In many South Dakota public schools, there is a three-year gap in U.S. history.”  Finally, attention to a problem other than federally imposed liberal common core standards.

      History professor Wilfred M. McClay, in the just-arrived issue of Imprimis, begins with a chilling assessment: “Historical study and history education in the United States today are in a bad way, and the causes are linked. In both cases, we have lost our way by forgetting that the study of the past makes the most sense when it is connected to a larger, public purpose, and is thereby woven into the warp and woof of our common life.”  This publication boasts “over 2,900,000 readers monthly.”

      Both articles, of course, imply that common core is a definitive problem in American culture.  The feds might impose their own liberal interpretation of “history” on the national K-12 curriculum, but other “special interest groups” have their own common core, don’t they?  Christians have always had a common core, haven’t they?  So have those on the political right.  “Common core is just fine,” we now all argue, “so long as it’s my common core.”

     The teaching of mainstream history was more or less coherent in US culture during past generations.  But the French and Bolshevik Revolutions turned our heritage and traditions decidedly to the left.  George Orwell’s 1984 understood how “Big Brother” would eliminate the teaching of the past by spoon-feeding newly fashioned history at every moment.  Hello *computers, *television documentaries, *new top-down common core history curricula, and *politically updated interpretations of the Constitution by the US Supreme Court!

     By fragmenting or eliminating the teaching of history, a population fueled by pop culture can be easily subverted by any dictator.  Goodbye individual consciousness.  So long freedom. By the way, isn’t the historical symbolism of places like Mount Rushmore already archaic?  Won’t “new” values (such as gender, race, sexual orientation) campaigns soon appear that will expose the selfish tourism “greed” of the Black Hills?  Best to get ready.