Ignorance of recent events endangers America: students today are failing U.S. history. But more important, they will fail the nation in the future unless this trend is reversed

VFW Magazine, Sept, 2003 by Ernest W. Lefever

In the hilarious movie When Harry Met Sally, an older adult asks a younger one where she was when Kennedy was shot. The latter replies: "Ted Kennedy was shot?" More recently, when a visiting lecturer at a university mentioned the Great Emancipator, several female students thought he meant feminist Gloria Steinem.

That these stories could be multiplied a hundred fold, points to the persistent ignorance of recent history among America's high school and college students.

Last spring, Pulitzer Prize winner David McCullough told a Senate panel that widespread ignorance of America's history poses a serious threat to the nation's security. "We can't function as a society if we don't know who we are and where we came from: His emphasis on both early and recent history is underscored by his, two best,selling biographies: John Adams and Truman.

Surprisingly, McCullough said that only three American colleges require a course on the Constitution to graduate: the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, the Naval Academy at Annapolis and the Air Force Academy in Colorado. The common denominator here is obvious.

Proficiency & Understanding

Only about 10% of high school students are currently "profident" in American history, according to a national test used to determine U.S. grants to state school systems.

To understand American democracy and our unique role in the world, we need to grasp the full sweep of our history. The ongoing debate over Iraq and the post-Sept. 11 war against international terrorism demonstrates the need to understand our recent past.

Today, many Americans know more about the Civil War than the Cold War, though the latter has a far greater bearing on current foreign and defense policies.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was the most dramatic symbol of the startling changes in the Soviet empire. But we cannot comprehend its full meaning without knowing why the Wall was erected in the first place. This includes events such as the "Big Three" Yalta Conference in 1945, the Berlin airlift in 1948, Moscow's crushing of the Budapest uprising in 1956 and the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

Our 40-year Cold War against the "evil empire" provided the backdrop for Ronald Reagan's courageous ultimatum in 1987: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this Wall!"

How can we understand President George W. Bush's determination to overthrow Saddam Hussein's brutal regime in Iraq if we don't know how and why the first President Bush fought a war to expel Saddam's troops from oil-rich Kuwait?

Media Bias

The problem of understanding our recent past is exacerbated by our media-saturated society. We are assaulted by a barrage of vivid and conflicting images pouring from network and cable TV and the Internet.

The "hard news" is interspersed with vivid and less-than-uplifting entertainment shows targeting teenage viewers. It is difficult to sort out the significant from the trivial. So the viewer is often left with a garbled picture of recent and contemporary events.

The problem is made worse by media bias. Bernard Goldberg's best seller, Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News, concludes that the prestige press has a liberal and "politically correct" anti-military slant.

This distortion is underscored in our universities, where many history and social science professors are sharply critical of U.S. military and foreign policies.

A 2002 study by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, conducted six months after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, found that more than 140 college campuses in 36 states had hosted anti-war rallies denouncing U.S. military actions against terrorists in Afghanistan.

These demonstrations reflect how recent history is taught and point to an anti-American or blame-America-first stance among many social science and humanities faculty members.

The Council study also found that an anti-patriotic bias was making its way into some college courses. One University of California campus introduced a post-9/11 course on "The Sexuality of Terrorism." And a new UCLA course examined "America's record of imperialistic adventurism." Students at an Ohio university called the American flag a symbol of military and male oppression, opting instead for the international peace symbol (a circle with an upside down Y in the center).

Teaching History Backwards

The way 11th grade American history is taught in the nation's high schools also contributes to the problem. Many widely used textbooks for this two-semester course are deficient because their final chapters emphasize fashionable issues, such as "peace studies," the women's movement and the environment rather than solid political history.

With an undue emphasis on "neglected minorities" our authentic heroes are often shortchanged.

Some history texts have a good final chapter on U.S. foreign policy, but frequently the class doesn't get that far. Hence, many pupils know more about the Revolutionary and Civil wars than they do about the Berlin Blockade, to say nothing about Vietnam, the 1991 Gulf War and 9/11.