“Teach it to your children…”

May 16, 2005 By

More and more I am convinced that were I having my children now, I would be putting them into a private school or home-schooling them, myself.

Victor Davis Hanson writes of the re-visioning of World War II.

Guess what? These days, The US was a bad guy, and Europe didn’t really need us, and we were way too aggressive in prosecuting the war.

There are two disturbing things about the current revisionism that transcend the human need to question orthodoxy. The first is the sheer hypocrisy of it all. Whatever mistakes and lapses committed by the Allies, they pale in comparison to the savagery of the Axis or the Communists. Post-facto critics never tell us what they would have done instead — lay off the German cities and send more ground troops into a pristine Third Reich; don’t bomb, but invade, an untouched Japan in 1946; keep out of WWII entirely; or in its aftermath invade the Soviet Union?

[...]

Second, revisionism requires knowledge of orthodoxy. One cannot dismiss Iwo Jima as an unnecessary sideshow or allege that Dresden was simple blood rage until one understands the tactical and strategic dilemmas of the age — the hope that wounded and lost B-29s might be saved by emergency fields on Iwo, or that the Russians wanted immediate help from the Allied air command to take the pressure off the eastern front in February 1945.

But again, most Americans never learned the standard narrative of War II — only what was wrong about it. Whereas it is salutary that an American 17-year-old knows something of the Japanese relocation ordered by liberals such as Earl Warren and FDR, or of the creation and the dropping of the atomic bomb by successive Democratic administrations, they might wish to examine what went on in Nanking, Baatan, Wake Island, Guadalcanal, Manila, or Manchuria — atrocities that their sensitive teachers are probably clueless about as well.

Unpleasant as the task is, read this column. Staggering. It will turn your stomach. Send it to everyone you know. Then get a hold of some history books written before this generation and teach it to your children, yourself.

Filed Under: Education, US Military
About Elizabeth Scalia

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  • Darrell

    This has been going on in earnest since the 1980′s. I had some run-ins with teachers back then. When the song “99 Red Balloons” came out, I was asked why we attacked the Germans from a straight “A” student. I met her earnest little Leftie teacher and soon saw there was no chance of changing anything at the school. The solution? Taking charge of your own childrens’ education at home…Plenty of good books, supplemented by “The World at War” series and lots good conversation. And letting your children know the truth about life and the world. Knowing that they can’t change the system and must deal with authority figures to insure their successs in life. But also knowing the truth and passing it along when you can. I was thrilled to see her and her friends watching the “The World at War” tapes one Saturday afternoon…

  • http://www.cuanas.blogspot.com Pastorius

    David Gelertner proposes teaching the Bible as Literature in schools. Clearly, Americans do not want to break down the wall between church and state, but at the same time, it is true that certain understandings of the Bible were formative in the creation, and continual recreation, of America. In other words, the Bible, along with the works of John Locke, Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriett Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, etc., is the source material of America.

    In fact, the Bible can be said to be primary source material, because the works of all these other writers I mentioned draw upon the Bible, and are therefore tertiary. This is a battle that needs to be fought. To remove the Bible completely from the study of American history is to untether the founding of America from it’s source material.

    The truth is, American History has not been taught well for quite a long time. When I was in high school, back in the 70′s, not only was the Bible never mentioned, but I don’t recall ever having heard of John Locke either.

    There are many reasons that to this day, I still do not consider myself a conservative. And the subject of education is one of them. As we sit here in the phantasmic and slimy light of the Postmodern era, the notion of school vouchers seems like just one more opportunity for relativism to exercise it’s power in American society.

    I think we have gotten it wrong on the subject of education, my friends. Rather than worrying about states rights, and libertarian fantasies of competition in the educational market place, I think it is time for America to sit down, as we did when we wrote the Constitution in the first place, and figure out who we are in history, and how we want to teach it. I think this needs to be done on a national level. And I think our history needs to taught in a cohesive and consistent manner across our nation.

    If this isn’t done I predict more and more revisionism in history. More and more competing “dialogues” on history. More and more, the truth of American History will disappear into the obscure clouds of trendy academic argumentation. If we add school vouchers to the mix, American History will become an idealogical buffet.

    That conservatives don’t see this reality betrays a willful blindness founded on greed, in my opinion. It makes sense to me that people would look at the quality of education provided by the American school system and ask themselves, “Why would I want my tax dollars to pay for this?” But, the answer to that question is not to subject history to the whims of the marketplace, but instead to treeat history as the delicate combination of art and science which it is.

    History is made up of events which really happened, and the interpretation of those events. One thing our current marketplace ought to teach us very clearly is that the free enterprise system is not the best arbitrer between reality and it’s interpretation. Such arbitration should be left to the wisdom and will of mankind, tamed by the immutable laws upon which this country was founded.

    Pastorius from CUANAS

  • Margaret

    Pastorius,

    Who will be guiding this “conversation?” How will the outcome be, if contrary to the current NEA bias, be effected?

    The longer the slanted history is taught, the fewer people remain to set the record straight.

    I agree that a fragmented educational establishment leads to a very divided America, but this is a case of locking the barn door too late — we already have a divided America, with the Leftist version in full ascendency in academia.

    The only hope of telling America’s story as we older people learned and lived it, is to have an alternative school system (like the parochial schools which offered a different view of life until the RC Church succumbed to secularism).

  • TheAnchoress

    Funnily enough, when I was in high school there was a course called “The Bible as Literature” and it was a straight up course on metaphor, simile, poetry, symbolism…it was fascinating.

    I wonder if they still offer it.

  • Darrell

    Our only hope is teaching our children how to educate themselves. The difference between actual source material and opinion pieces and interpretations. To draw their own conclusions after they have examined the facts. We have to make sure that we don’t lose our source materials along the way. In the meantime, we fight. Fight to loosen the stranglehold of the Left, one battle at a time…

  • http://www.bureaucraticdaycare.blogspot.com Dani

    I am so glad to hear that the homeschool movement is really taking off! Praise the Lord!

    Christian children have no place in a godless government school system!