Monday May 05, 2003

THE LESSEN(ING) OF HISTORY. Matthew Yglesias cites a scare-stat at CNN of the sort meant to make citizens cry, "We must have meaningless national tests so we can make believe we're serious about education!"

MY says, "When you think about it: So what? If 40 percent of college seniors don't know the dates of the Civil War and America's still the richest, most powerful country on earth, doesn't this just go to show that it's not very important if a significant minority of the population doesn't know when it happened."

That could be disputed -- you might say that essential historical facts, like "Columbus sailed the ocean blue/In Fourteen Hundred and Ninety-Two," are cultural totems that help bind nations together psychologically. (This is dangerously close to a Peggy Noonan idea, but I'm not disqualifying it on those grounds, believe it or not. Also, Noonan believes in teaching lies as a way of inducing patriotism -- "A person in Hollywood might say, 'Wait, it’s good their love of country isn’t based on a lack of realism.' But I’ve never seen any kind of love that lasted without a little lack of realism" -- wheras the facts are good enough for me.)

Yglesias does have a good point about Civil War education: "What worries me about America's historical ignorance is that there seem to be large numbers of people who don't understand that the Civil War was, fundamentally, about slavery."

Well, yes. And if it might help if the Republican base were down with this program as well. Unfortunately, a trawl through Free Republic shows that many of their heads are in a dissimilar place when it comes to the Lost Cause. ("Hey .. thanks for the reminder. I'll have to go have a beer for John Wilkes Booth Appreciation day... Lincoln was Lenin 50 years early, and a Marxist as well.")

In regard to our historical amnesia, as with much else, you have to ask: who benefits? Recently some folks were comparing the Iraq adventure to the Spanish-American War. Many readers, I'm sure, asked: The What-What War? And if we won, how could it be bad? Even much more recent history is hard for us: We currently have a hit song explicitly tying Saddam Hussein to the World Trade Center attacks.

I'm not paranoid -- I don't think this is all the result of propaganda. I just don't think people are paying attention. Still, the thought occurs to me that maybe we don't teach good history because its results are less reliable than those of ignorance.