Lesson plan:What kids don't know about our country's history can hurt us all

Here's another from Walter Williams.

Success Equals Effort (SEE) policy. SEE is a policy where 60 percent of a freshman's grade is based on effort and the rest on academic performance.

When people are not taught about their history or their country, they have no roots, they feel no pride.

In other words, they learn to hate America with great self esteem. How can you have self esteem if you hate your Country?

History is arguably the most important discipline. Hitler planned to ban the teaching of history to the Slavs he conquered, so as to deny them an identity and moral compass (see Hitler's Table Talk, a collection of his conversations from 1941-44-a brilliant book). What worries me is that the Left seems to have come to the same conclusion.
The lack of any historical perspective is why so many people are against the Iraq war/WOT. They do not understand the immense difficulty in winning a real conflict--they grew up on Clinton's "Bomb them from the Air/Withdraw When Any Resistance on the Ground Occurs" wars. But I am heartened by the success of the history channel, as well as grass-roots efforts (I know I'll ramble on forever if the subject of history is broached). And I've always held that self-education is far more effective than the indoctrination that occurs in our public schools.

Ask a youth when the Civil War and WWII took place and you will be lucky to get an answer within 50 years of the actual dates.

I had a teacher years back who used to hate and loathe teaching the civil war. It was one of the only classes I ever had where if you asked questions regarding the civil war, she reacted with hostility.

It was simply, north good, south bad, slavery only issue, any kind of question outside of having these as answers makes you bad.

She made an african american student look like the 2nd coming of the Klan when she asked a couple of very simply questions. (teacher confused the students anti-war beliefs with being a closet southern sympathizer).

D-Day arguably is the biggest day in the country's history. Everything before it led up to it and everything after is a consequence. I don't know how much bigger you can get.

Ambrose was an ass. This attempt to elevate WW2 as the new founding moment of American history is a rejection of all that came before it. (Actually it is a rejection of everything before the 60s revolution, but hijacking WW2 is a good way for the militants to pretend they're patriotic and get the rubes on board for the rest of the program in a way that appealing to the '65 Voting Rights Act or Great Society programs just wouldn't. Why do you think Steven Spielberg and Tom Brokaw keep spouting this stuff?) You saw the same thing with Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York in which he seriously tried to advance the idea that these gangs were the REAL founders of modern America. The plain fact is that the history of America is rather embarrassingly mono-ethnic and is counter to the beliefs of the present dominant caste in other ways as well, so the original players have to be written out so the new players can be written in.

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