This is a riff on a College Fix article by Dave Huber.
I love America. I love it for what it is. But I don’t always love what it does. My love for my country is not based on circumstance or performance. It is an unconditional love that does not ignore its flaws.
Zachary Cote
A lot of us can get behind that. Competent history teachers should teach the bad of America—along with the good—in a fair, commonsense manner. Unfortunately, we know folks like Cote express these sentiments until they say something like this:
[S]chools need to reevaluate history instruction to empower students to contemplate historical tensions and enable a type of patriotism that transcends our polarizing moment …A focus on content makes us choose between 1619 and 1776; a disciplinary approach empowers us to recognize the historical significance of both. A history education that prioritizes what needs to be learned forces us to choose between Juneteenth and Independence Day. A discipline that instructs us how we can learn more deeply about our nation’s past enables us to celebrate both.
Cote worries that Donald Trump’s edicts will “deemphasize” tragedies such as the fate of Native Americans and blacks during Reconstruction. Are contemporary teachers “deemphasizing” topics like slavery, the plight of Native Americans, and the like? The pushback (for lack of a better term) from Trump and others comes from an overemphasis on such topics to the exclusion of other material. Until the 21st Century, Juneteenth was a very local, often ignored day. Now people falsely claim it marks the day the US truly abolished slavery, instead of the day a Union General read an order in Galveston, because many in the area knew of emancipation long before.
No choice is necessary unless you want to believe a myth.
How have so many college students come to believe slavery was an exclusively American phenomenon? How can over 90 percent of college grads know that Thomas Jefferson owned slaves or that (may have) fathered children by a slave, but less than 10 percent know he wrote the Declaration of Independence and served two terms as president? Why have modern “educators” quickly embraced factually flawed programs like the 1619 Project? How is it that high school kids are being taught that Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor resulted from American imperialism?
Should we take Cote at his word?
The stated mission of Thinking Nation is to “empower students to thrive as engaged and critical thinkers, support teachers with meaningful curricula, training, and technology, [and] “transform social studies education for the future of democracy.”
Thinking Nation’s main page says, “Historical Thinking Promotes Equity.”
The notorious DEI codewords “critical,” “transform,” and especially “equity” should set off our BS detectors. Too, one of the organization’s board of directors is Catherine O’Donnell, a history professor at Arizona State University who, a few years back, co-penned an article in which she lamented certain areas of academia no longer are “publicly perceived as authoritative,” and that these alleged experts “enjoy no special public esteem.”
The culprits behind this (accurate) perception? The free-speech right.
Sure, America has flaws; thousands of them. The country was born of people with flaws, and the republic developed more. But we overcame most of them, abolished the causes of many more, and have rectified many injustices through the centuries. To emphasize the flaws and ignore the achievements, which many “educators,” pundits, and other blowhards try to do, is just as “problematic” as doing the opposite. Doing so strays from teaching and marches straight to indoctrination by forbidding students from holding any positions other than that of the pedagog grading the exams.
The Past Not Taken: Three Novellas
People with flaws, biases, and access to sources write history, some sources better than others. Knowing how to put it together takes a great deal of work; trust me on this. Yet, it’s surprising how much of what we “know” about the past just ain’t so.
This is how history books are written.
And Finally...
On 19 September:
1853: The battle called Chickamauga entered its second day in northeastern Georgia near a creek by that name. The three-day brawl, fought between the forces of William S. Rosecrans and Braxton Bragg, ended the next day with the Union forces retreating to Chattanooga, Tennessee, to be besieged for two months. Although the Confederacy held the battlefield and is said to have “won,” they suffered more casualties than their counterparts in this second most costly battle of the Civil War.
1995: The Unabomber Manifesto, or "Industrial Society and its Future," appears in the Washington Post. The 35,000-word manifesto served as an ideological foundation for Ted Kaczynski’s 1978–1995 mail bomb campaign. His brother identified the writing, and authorities arrested Kaczynski on 3 April 1996 based on his information.
Avast ye swabs! ‘Tis Talk Like A Pirate Day!
This parodic holiday, created on 6 June 1995, by John Baur and Mark Summers of Albany, Oregon, came about because of an injury. During a racquetball game between Summers and Baur, one of them, in pain, said, “Aaarrr!” and the idea of talking like a pirate (Eglish with a West Country accent) today was born. Out of respect for observing the 1944 Normandy landings on that day, they chose Summers’ ex-wife’s birthday (19 September), as it would be easy for him to remember.
It started as a private joke.
The joke gained exposure when “Ol’ Chumbucket” Baur and “Cap’n Slappy” Summers sent a letter about their invented holiday to syndicated humor columnist Dave Barry in 2002. Barry, unable to let a good punchline go to waste, promoted the joke in his column…and it morphed from there into…well…it’s gone international, apparently, observed in Britain by 2023.
The Pastafarian movement has adopted it since.
The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, another parody, got its start in opposition to the teaching of intelligent design in public schools. Adherents hold Pastafarianism is as legitimate a religion as any other, and the “faith” has received some limited recognition…and how it became associated with talking like a pirate is a mystery for the ages…
I don’t know, John. I think we’ve both benefitted from an educational system that promoted critical thinking and attempted to show America’s successes and failures even-handedly. From my perspective, the people pushing the most against DEI are the ones wanting to sell a white-washed version of American history and denying differing perspectives. To criticize America and want it to live up to its ideals is not to be un-American (Note: not suggesting you feel that way). It’s telling to me that flying an American flag or wearing an American flag pin is often to be associated with the hard right, when they should be symbols we all can embrace.
As I used to tell my college students for 20 years, point to another country without faults, mistakes, or horrendous decisions, and then put those decisions within the context of the times in which they were made.