For Upright Citizens who Don't Read Good

Well, this is interesting.

Republicans in my state continue to focus on everything BUT jobs, taking up a bill today that would require public high schools to teach a semester-long course on, I guess you’d call it the philosophical underpinning of America’s government.

In the print version of this story (unfortunately not online), the News & Record quotes several supporters, including businessman David Steadman, who says this curriculum “…will fortify them [students] as they go out into the world and they become voters and responsible producers.” The paper also writes that “The measure is on the national agenda for the American Legislative Exchange Council, a national group of mainly Republican and ‘business-friendly’ legislators.”

Not in this article… the same concept appears to have the support of the N.C. Family Policy Council, who are way scarier than that bunch of fiscal conservatives at ALEC.

“If the citizens of America would be very protective and vigilant for those [founding] principles, we would not be in this mess,” Steadman is quoted as saying. It’s not clear exactly how he defines the principles of this country’s founders, or even the “Founding Fathers” themselves. (As I’ve written, we’re talking about hundreds of people living throughout the 13 colonies over a period of several decades. Which ones are you talking about, and at which points in their careers?)

It’s interesting because Steadman, et al., just unwittingly aligned themselves with James Loewen, the professor and author of Lies My Teacher Told Me and Lies Across America, whose pet issue is the failure of U.S. history education to prepare students to be informed citizens.

Lies My Teacher Told Me might be of particular interest to Steadman, as it focuses specifically on history textbooks commonly used in public high schools. One of them was the text used in my AP U.S. History class, though my teacher was sensible enough to supplement it with contemporary accounts, source documents and other books. Loewen found outright inaccuracies, but he also found history that was poorly explained, dumbed down, hero-ified, glossed over or ignored.

The funny thing is that when Loewen or other academics point out the danger in teaching students that the government is always right and that America never does anything it shouldn’t at home or abroad, right-wingers call them revisionists, or worse. And now that the Tea Party has suddenly rediscovered The Federalist, it’s suddenly okay to revise the curriculum.

I absolutely agree that Americans should understand how our government works and why it was built the way it was, if for no other reason than the importance of grasping that Medicare is a federal program. The Federalist, the collection of (essentially) Letters to the Editor that Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay wrote promoting ratification of the Constitution – and dropping the weak federal government that existed under the Articles of Confederation – should be required reading for every American.

(Hey, let’s start with Rep. Harold Brubaker, chief sponsor of the N.C. bill. Harold, I’d like 500 words on #51, particularly Mr. Madison’s statement, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”)

I was fortunate enough to grow up in a family of history buffs, surrounded by books and discussion, taking countless trips to historic areas. I was fortunate enough to live in a state that – apologies to the guys sponsoring this bill – does in fact require civics, world and U.S. history (complete with an EOG test) in high school. And, in those classes at my public schools, I was deeply fortunate enough to have teachers who cared enough about the subject to require additional books – including, by my count twice, The Federalist (which I got again in college).

So, despite agreeing with Steadman and the rest in principle, I disagree here that the problem lies in the state-required curriculum. If there are schools and teachers who don’t have the resources to explain the history of the founding of our government, then give them funding – don’t require that they do more while you axe their budgets and fire 13,000 of them.

And, most importantly, don’t align yourselves with the people who think that hate crime statutes infringe on their free speech. Because this student of history learned a long time ago to look not just at what you say you support, but at who’s supporting you. You don’t want to look ideological, fine. Don’t be ideological.

And, Mr. Steadman? Please don’t lecture me about my “freedoms.” I had Mr. Surratt and Mrs. Sawyers.