Why Johnny's not anti-communist - criticism of teaching of history in American high schools

National Review, Feb 5, 1990 by Arch Puddington

Why Johnny's Not Anti-Communist

WITH COMMUNISM everywhere in inglorious retreat, Mikhail Gorbachev has warned the West against the impulse to "glat" over the socialist world's time of troubles. As far as American high-school students are concerned, Gorbachev needn't have bothered. It seems, in fact, that young Americans don't even know there's anything to gloat about.

A survey conducted by the Washington Post revealed high-school students reacting with bewilderment and apathy to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The heart of the matter appears to be rank ignorance of the nature of the Communist system. Students, according to a teacher in Pasadena, California, "don't understand what Communism is in the first place. So when you say it's the death of Communism, they don't know what you're talking about." One student in an honors government class in Austin, Texas, displayed total confusion over the term "satellite," asking: "Are we talking about satellite dishes or what?"

Even more disturbing was a general lack of sympathy for the plight of the newly emancipated European states. Some students were quoted as opposing American aid to former Communist countries; others expressed fear that Eastern European upheavals could lead to United States involvement in a shooting war, a prospect that no serious observer has raised. There was also evidence that the corrosive message of economic nationalism was having an effect, as students fretted over a united Germany's economic impact on the United States.

How does one explain, in the midst of the most inspirational changes in the postwar era, this inability of the future generation to recognize the magnificence of freedom's triumph?

One answer, but the least convincing, is television. Even a moderately careful observer should have found network reporting on Eastern Europe one of the medium's more impressive moments, with visually gripping images of the events of the day supplemented by reasonably intelligent background coverage.

Another factor, largely unmentioned but certainly relevant, is the absence of a military draft. I remember high-school classmates following the various Berlin crises of the early Sixties with intense concern, mainly because all able-bodied young men had reason to believe that they might soon be summoned to fight in yet another European war. Recall also how quickly Vietnam faded from the consciousness of the "politically motivated" Sixties generation once the draft had been abolished.

But the basic source of the problem is to be found in our educational system, especially the progressive deterioration in the teaching of history.

As the Pasadena teacher said and the Austin student demonstrated, students don't know the facts, and they certainly don't understand the concepts. Studies have shown shockingly high percentages of high-school students unable to identify Churchill or Stalin, or even name our adversaries in World War II. At the same time, the schools are failing in their mission to impart an understanding of the democratic system of government.

Compounding a general lowering of standards is the challenge posed by the new, trendy schools of political thought which have merged since the 1960s--feminism, Third Worldism, "peace studies," "global values." In some cases--Third Worldism, for instance--these theories are openly antithetical to traditional democracy, stressing the role of the collective (i.e., the state) over the rights of individuals. Even those which are not directly hostile to democracy are nonetheless subversive of the democratic idea--identifying yearnings for individual and political rights as unfortunate reflections of a Eurocentric mentality and potential sources of international conflict. Some of these newer theories have been insinuated into the basic textbooks used for history and government courses; more often they are promoted by cause organizations through study guides and other materials prepared as complements to the basic curriculum.

A few examples give a sense of the dilemma confronting the history teacher as he prepares his course plans for the term: curriculum supplements criticize the emphasis on liberal democtracy as "ethnocentric"; a teaching guide on human rights equates the rights to free speech, political participation, and due process with the "right" to a vacation; the same guide speaks of the value placed on the right to strike by the "pre-liberation) Communist regimes of Eastern Europe; another guide, financed by the U.S. Department of Education, lauds Cuba for its guarantees of women's rights, noting that men who fail to share in household responsibilities can be punished with "re-education or assignment to farm work."

THE NEWS isn't uniformly bad. The Education for Democracy Project, sponsored by the American Federation of Teachers, Freedom House, and the Educational Excellence Network, has completed a preliminary study on the teaching of democratic values which gives mixed grades to the basic texts used in high-school courses. The survey, for example, concludes that the textbooks do a reasonably good job of recounting the basic facts about the rise of the Soviet Union and the Sovietization of Eastern Europe.