Ignorance Is the End of Freedom

Visitors look at the original copies of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights at the National Archives in Washington in this file photo. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Commentary

There’s currently a raging national debate on what our students should know or not know about American history. This debate goes to the very core of our national being and future.

That’s why I chose to write my new book, “Toward a Perfect Union: The Moral and Cultural Case for Teaching the Great American Story.”

So much of the cultural chaos we’re experiencing today—incivility toward each other, violence in our inner cities, misconceptions about the role of government—can be tied to two things: (1) Americans don’t know their history or how their government works and (2) the history they do know is distorted and has created a victim mentality among our populace. Instead of history bringing us together under a collective narrative, it’s now taught in a way that divides us and pits people and groups against each other.

We’re also a country that’s now ignorant of the most basic historical and civic knowledge that’s essential for an informed citizenry. For instance, a 2018 survey done for the Institute for Citizens and Scholars surveyed people in all 50 states and found that:

• Only 53 percent were able to earn a passing grade in U.S. history.
• 37 percent believed Benjamin Franklin invented the light bulb (it was Thomas Edison).
• 12 percent believed Dwight Eisenhower led the military in the American Civil War (which ended in 1865—Eisenhower was born in 1890).
• 2 percent said climate change caused the Cold War.

A 2015 survey by the Newseum Institute (pdf) found that 43 percent of American adults don’t know that the First Amendment gave them freedom of speech. No wonder we now have cancel culture permeating every aspect of our society.

But the problem goes beyond ignorance to deliberate disinformation about America’s past that’s being taught throughout our nation’s educational system.

The wrongful teaching of American history in our K–12 educational system began in the late 1960s, starting in liberal enclaves such as the San Francisco Bay Area and then spreading across the country over time. However, the seeds were planted in our institutions of higher education in the 1950s through the teachings of individuals such as Howard Zinn, who started his academic career teaching at Spelman College in 1956.

Zinn, for instance, singlehandedly transformed the study of history in American public education from the discipline of surveying facts and events to “reframing” and “reimaging” facts to fit a particular narrative—and his narrative was the destruction of Western civilization and that America was built on corruption, genocide, and racism. His teaching transformed the cultural narrative from America being about our collective good and responsibility to one of selfish demands and victimization. He once said, “[Civil disobedience] is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience.”

Mary Graber, resident fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization, in her book “Debunking Howard Zinn” wrote: “Zinn’s propaganda has been spectacularly effective. His dishonest American history is not the only factor in Americans’ turn away from their heritage of freedom towards communist fantasies. But [he] has been instrumental in this destructive transformation.”

The most recent manifestation of this teaching is “The 1619 Project” from Nikole Hannah-Jones and promoted by The New York Times, which I wrote extensively about in my book.

The ultimate goal of cancel culture and items such as The 1619 Project is to destroy America’s foundations through ignorance and disinformation and create an entirely different nation that no longer embodies the principles of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. Hannah-Jones said about The 1619 Project: “The fight over The 1619 Project is not about history. It is about memory.” To get rid of the old memory, a new memory must be created, which is what the far left is doing.

No one is perfect, and no country is perfect. And just as we learn from our mistakes in our own lives, we learn from our mistakes as a nation and move forward. If we don’t know our mistakes, we’re doomed to repeat them. But creating a new “memory” means the correct memory of those mistakes will be forgotten, and thus, we'll be doomed to repeat them. We need to ensure that we provide a blueprint that corrects our errors, instead of making new ones. That’s another one of the goals of my book.

As Eisenhower so prophetically said in his first inaugural address, “A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.”

The current teaching of American history values privileges over principles, and as a result, unless corrected, we'll continue to go down the road, as Eisenhower said, of losing both.

That’s why there’s a moral and cultural case for getting back to teaching the great American story—so we can be united, rather than divided, as a nation, regardless of our personal beliefs. I believe if we can recapture the accurate teaching of American history, it will result in an appreciation of our shared heritage and beliefs and a more unified and civil America.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.