National Review Online
Monday, September 21, 2020
America’s proud history is worth defending, and it is
worth defending through government and politics. There are fair arguments about
how best to go about that task consistently with a duly conservative skepticism
about the proper powers of federal and local government, but conservatives
should not shy away from conserving the core of our national history, ideals,
and culture — a goal that not so long ago was neither partisan nor ideological.
The current lines of battle are joined around the
teaching of the New York Times 1619 Project, Howard Zinn’s 1980 screed A
People’s History of the United States, and other fact-challenged efforts to
supplant the story of America, its ideals, and its exceptional history with
critical-race and gender theory and leftist agitprop. It is wrong to fill the
heads of children with falsehoods, or to subject them to outside-the-mainstream
theories until they are old enough to learn to evaluate them critically. It is
right and important to commemorate what makes this nation great and special.
Control of public-school curricula is properly a local
matter, but presidents can provide moral leadership, start national
conversations, and raise alarms in this area. So long as there is a federal
Department of Education with its hands in school curricula, its actions, too,
should aim to be constructive rather than destructive. A proper American
history does not mean feeding children Parson Weems’s whitewashed just-so stories.
It is, rather, what Ronald Reagan called for in his Farewell Address in 1989,
an “informed patriotism”:
An informed patriotism is what we
want. And are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is
and what she represents in the long history of the world? . . . We’ve got to do
a better job of getting across that America is freedom — freedom of speech,
freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise. And freedom is special and rare.
It’s fragile. . . . Let’s start with some basics: more attention to American
history and a greater emphasis on civic ritual.
It is to preserve that history and civic ritual that the
Trump administration has announced a “1776 Commission” to promote patriotic
education. The commission, at least as presently envisioned, will not dictate
anything to anyone. There is precedent for such a commission. In 1973, Congress
created the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration, which oversaw the
pageantry of public patriotic events in 1976. The Statue of Liberty–Ellis
Island Centennial Commission performed a similar function in 1986 for the
symbols of America’s immigrant roots. The national Commission on the
Bicentennial of the United States Constitution in 1987, chaired by Chief
Justice Warren Burger, partnered with the Smithsonian, the National Endowment
for the Humanities, the American Bar Association, the National Park Service,
and the Daughters of the American Revolution to educate Americans on the
history and blessings of our national charter.
How President Trump plans to fund the commission’s work
without Congress may be another story. The cultural Left has often openly
extorted private corporations into funding its propaganda, whether or not that
extortion takes the form of government power. Trump claims that his approval of
a new deal between TikTok, Walmart, and Oracle is conditioned on $5 billion
directed by the companies towards a patriotic-education foundation. It does not
appear that this would fund the presidential commission directly, but while the
cause is a good one, the government should not be in the business of
conditioning regulatory approvals on the creation of slush funds for cultural
causes.
We are likewise skeptical of federal efforts to ban
schools from teaching the 1619 Project or other particular books or courses of
study. This is not the proper role of Washington. Where federal funding is
being used to finance leftist propaganda, the better solution should be to
eliminate that funding or redirect it to parents to control.
Informed patriotic education was once seen as a necessary
component of citizenship. No prior generation of American leaders would have
argued that we should be indifferent to whether our citizens know their own
history and the Founding ideals on which the nation rests. Abraham Lincoln
returned often to the unique history of America, not only to hold together the
nation in crisis but to call it to its highest ideals. Calvin Coolidge,
celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, argued:
Our forefathers came to certain
conclusions and decided upon certain courses of action which have been a great
blessing to the world. Before we can understand their conclusions we must go
back and review the course which they followed. We must think the thoughts
which they thought. . . . If we are to maintain the great heritage which has
been bequeathed to us, we must be like-minded as the fathers who created it.
Parents, of course, should be the first teachers of
patriotism and the reasons why we love America and its history. So long as
children are educated by the government, however, what they are taught will
also be a political issue. Conservatives are overdue to enter that essential
fight. We applaud the president for doing so.
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