Ramblings

Allan C. Brownfeld

Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute of Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.

Growing Ignorance of History and Government Is a Threat to American Democracy

The teaching of American history, and how our government works, is in serious decline. This poses a real threat to the future of American democracy.

Consider the treatment of George Washington. The first president of the United States is steadily being removed from the nation’s schools. “The evidence is overwhelming that George Washington is rapidly being short-tripped in the classrooms across the country,” said James Rees, executive director of Mount Vernon, Washington’s historic Virginia estate. Rees said:

For instance, my fourth-grade textbook in Richmond had 10 times more coverage of George Washington than the textbook used in that same school in 1982. Imagine what it must be now.

The displacement of America’s first president, says Matthew Spalding, director of the Heritage Foundation’s B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies, is the result of an incorrect understanding of Washington as a man, combined with a trend in historical scholarship. Spalding said:

There is a general decline in teaching about dead, white, 18th century males. That’s where we are today, and, as a result, Washington has really suffered,

 

Joseph Ellis, Pulitzer Prize winning historian and author of the recently published His Excellency, George Washington, points out that,

One of the major trends in history in the last 20 years is something called social history. It’s the study of the ordinary figures, the inarticulate who aren’t the most prominent. There are people . . . who think we should identify great achievements not as the product of individuals, but should see it in more collective respects.

Bad history textbooks are as great a threat to American freedoms as terrorists, argues presidential biographer David McCullough. Says McCullough, who wrote the best-selling biography of John Adams,

Something’s eating away at the national memory, and a nation or a community or a society can suffer as much from the adverse effects of amnesia as can an individual.

In the annual Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment for the Humanities McCullough declared that,

For a free, self-governing people, something more than a vague familiarity with history is essential if we are to hold onto and sustain our freedom. But I don’t think history should ever be made to seem like some musty, unpleasant pill to be swallowed solely for our own civic good. History, let us agree, can be an immense source of pleasure. For almost anyone with the normal human allotment of curiosity and an interest in people, it is a field day.

Of current history textbooks, McCullough provides this assessment:

They are deadly. It’s as if they were designed to kill anyone’s interest in history rather than encourage it, and if you were told you have to go home tonight and read this book for two hours, you would say in your heart of hearts, what did I do wrong today that I’m being so punished?

In her book, The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Children Learn, New York University professor Diane Ravitch writes:

The once-traditional emphasis in textbooks on the growth of democratic institutions has nearly vanished. Glencoe’s World History: The Human Experience is typical, with its upbeat descriptions of “flowering civilizations” in every part of the world. Students who learn about the world from these texts are unlikely to understand why some civilized nations flourished and others languished, or why people vote with their feet to leave some places and go to others. . . . Nor will they have any deep knowledge of the great ideological, political, economic, and military struggles between democratic nations and their totalitarian adversaries in the 20th century. Nor will they perceive the critical importance of freedom, democracy, and human rights in the successful functioning of multi-ethnic, multi-religious societies. Nor will they have any insight into the historic struggle to protect religious freedom and to separate religion from the state.

Discussing contemporary trends of separating such areas of study as women and minorities from their historical context, David McCullough notes that students lose any sense of cause and effect:

They have no sense of what followed what and why, that everything has antecedents and everything has consequences. And they might think that’s true of life too. Students today have no sense of geography--they don’t understand about struggle . . . so many of the blessings and advantages we have, so many of the reasons why our civilization, our culture, has flourished aren’t understood; they’re not appreciated. And if you don’t have any appreciation of what people went through to get, to achieve, to build what you are benefiting from, then these things don’t mean very much to you. You just think, well, that’s the way it is. That’s our birthright. That just happened. But it didn’t just happen. And at what price? What grief? What disappointment? What suffering went on? I think that to be ignorant or indifferent to history isn’t just to be uneducated. . . . It’s to be rude, ungrateful . . .

More than two-thirds of college students and administrators who participated in a recent national survey were unable to remember that freedom of religion and the press are guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. In surveys conducted at 339 colleges and universities, more than one-fourth of students and administrators did not list freedom of speech as an essential right protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution. More than three-fourths did not name freedom of assembly and association or the right “to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

If one thinks of the First Amendment as a foundational American liberty, the ignorance and misunderstanding of it by administrators at our nation’s colleges and universities is frightening, and the general ignorance and misunderstanding of it by students is quite depressing,

said Allan Charles Kors, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which commissioned the survey.

A study released early in 2005 found that American high school students lack knowledge and understanding of the First Amendment. More than a third of the nation’s high school students say the amendment--guaranteeing citizens the freedoms of religion, speech, press, assembly and the right to petition the government--goes too far in the rights it guarantees.

Hodding Carter, president the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which sponsored the survey, said

. . . these results are not only disturbing, they are dangerous. Ignorance about the basis of this free society is a danger to our nation’s future.

The survey of 112,003 students found that half said newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without governmental approval of stories. Thirty-two percent of the students said the press has too much freedom and 17 percent said people should not be allowed to express unpopular opinions. Half of the students wrongly thought that the government can censor the Internet.

Critics charge that most textbooks, produced by a handful of commercial publishers, are, in the name of political correctness, failing to give students an honest account of American history and are exposing generations of children to cultural and history amnesia. Paul Gagnon emeritus professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, states that,

Secondary and college students, and indeed most of the rest of us, have only a feeble grasp of politics and a vague awareness of history, especially the political history of the United States and the world.

Just 11 percent of eighth graders show proficient knowledge of U.S. history on standardized tests---down from 17 percent in 2001, Dr. Gagnon noted in a study for the American Federation of Teachers:

Less than half knew the Supreme Court could decide a law’s unconstitutionality. Only a third knew what the Progressive Era was and most were not sure whom we fought in World War II.

In a 2003 survey of seniors at 50 top colleges and universities by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, it was found that half didn’t know George Washington was the commanding general of the Continental Army during the American Revolution who accepted Brig. Gen. Charles Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown. Thirty-six percent thought it was Ulysses S. Grant, commander of the Union Army during the Civil War. Six percent said it was Douglas MacArthur, U.S. commander during the Korean War. Thirty-two percent said Washington. It was a multiple choice question.

Wilfred M. McClay, humanities professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, said that when graduates of Harvard and other great universities

.  .  . are not learning the basics of American history, it is safe to assume that almost no one is, and that there will be almost no one to pass such knowledge on to the next generation. Historical memory, is as much a necessity to the preservation of liberty and American security as is our own armed forces.

According to a report issued by the Cato Institute, voters do not know enough about the issues and the candidates to cast an informed ballot. “An informed electorate is a prerequisite for democracy,” writes Ilya Somin, assistant professor of law at George Mason School of Law. “If voters do not know what is going on in politics, they cannot rationally exercise control over government policy.”

Voter ignorance, he says, is doubly dangerous because it opens the door to manipulation of the public by the elite and encourages politicians to make policy errors to win votes from an ill-informed public. These actions create a larger government, which leads to a voting public less likely to waste its time learning about the government behemoth. Thus, the government becomes too large to be effectively controlled by the people.

Somin presents several studies that demonstrate a lack of political knowledge by American voters. A recent survey he cites had 70 percent of respondents unaware of the Medicare prescription drug benefit and 58 percent said they knew “nothing” or “very little” about the USA Patriot Act, two important, widely reported issues.

With 15 cabinet-level departments and 54 regulatory agencies and government corporations in the executive branch alone,

. . . it is doubtful in the extreme that voters could keep adequate track of all their activities even if they paid far more attention to political information than they do now.

Somin’s concern is not that the elite will deviously manipulate the public, rather that the elite simply rule by default. “What the voters don’t know about, they can’t meaningfully control,” he writes, and that threatens the very heart of American democracy.

At a time when the American population is going through dramatic change as result of immigration, both legal and illegal, the failure to teach our history, culture and values is of particular concern.

The Hispanic and Asian-American populations are expected to triple by 2050, when non-Hispanic whites would account for the barest majority, according to a 2004 Census Bureau report. How well can we integrate these immigrants into our society if we do not teach them our history, how our government works, and the values we hold dear?

For too long we have turned a blind eye to the growing ignorance of history and government produced by an educational system that has abandoned its traditional curriculum in the name of political correctness. The price for not changing course is likely to be a high one.

The Time Has Come to Confront the Bipartisan Philosophy of Big Government that Dominates Today’s Washington

There was a time when Republicans proclaimed their allegiance to smaller government and balanced budgets and Democrats proclaimed their support for increasingly activist government and found unbalanced budgets not worthy of concern.

Now, we see that both parties, at least the majority of both parties, seem to have embraced the philosophy of big government and deficit spending.

Fortunately, many conservatives are beginning to speak out in behalf of the older views that too many Republicans have abandoned.

David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute, declares that,

Freedom is really taking it on the chin in Washington, and both parties deserve some blame. Take the Republicans: I can remember when conservatives used to believe that the U.S. Constitution set up a government of strictly limited powers. It was supposed to protect us from foreign threats, deliver the mail, and leave everything else up to the several states or to the private sector. . . . I think that’s what lots of voters assumed they were getting when they voted for George W. Bush (in 2000). Bush campaigned across the country, telling voters, “My opponent trusts government; I trust you.” . . . What’s been the reality? Federal spending has increased under President Bush. You might say: “Federal spending always goes up. We can’t seem to stop that.” But---not counting interest payments, which are down---federal spending is up 29 percent in three years. Do you know who was the last president to spend at that pace? Lyndon Johnson.

Boaz notes that,

There are more non-defense-related federal employees than ever before. Education has been further federalized in the No Child Left Behind Act. Conservatives used to want to get rid of the Department of Education; now the administration is turning it into a national school board. Bush twisted every arm in Congress to pass the biggest budget entitlement program in 40 years--the Medicare prescription drug entitlement. The administration said it would cost $400 billion in the first 10 years--which was bad enough. After the vote, administration officials revealed that it would be about one-third more than that. And that’s for a program that has already run up an unfunded liability in the unimaginable sum of $37 trillion. . . . We have a government truly out of control.

In his new book, Rome Wasn’t Burnt In a Day: The Real Deal on How Bureaucrats and Other Washington Barbarians Are Bankrupting America (Harper Collins), former Rep. Joe Scarborough (R-Florida), currently a commentator on MSNBC, deplores the bloat of the federal budget under the Bush administration, lingering in detail over the proliferation of pork-barrel spending. He writes:

During Bill Clinton’s two terms and a GOP Congress, federal spending grew at a rate of 3.4 percent, whereas government spending has grown at a dangerous 10.4 percent clip during George W. Bush’s first term.

 

The Concord Coalition, which includes in its leadership both prominent Republicans and Democrats, says that with realistic assumptions but no change in policy, the federal debt will swell by $5 trillion in the next decade. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office warns that it looks as if “substantial reductions in the projected growth of spending or a sizable increase in taxes---or both---will probably be necessary” to avoid fiscal disaster.

Writing in The American Conservative, Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan, declares that,

American conservatism once represented a serious philosophy. Although the Republican Party often honored conservative principles only in the breach, there was a real difference between the philosophical camps and political parties. No one would mistake the governing philosophies of Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter. That difference is no longer possible to discern. . . . Under President George W. Bush, modern conservatism has become a slightly fainter version of modern liberalism. Both groups hold Thomas Sowell’s “unconstrained” vision of humanity, that people and their institutions are perfectible through the right application of spending, regulation and war. Whether seen as children or grandchildren, the slightly befuddled masses need control by their kindly political elders in Washington.

 

All too often, increases in government power and spending have been justified, argues former Rep. Bob Barr (R-Georgia), in the name of the war against terrorism:

It’s truly amazing . . . that virtually everything the Bush administration has done to expand government power or expenditures is justified as being essential to winning “the war against terrorism.” Propping up farmers through outdated and expensive subsidies? Helps fight terrorism. Subsidies to sugar producers in order to keep prices high? Necessary to fight terrorism. Tobacco subsidies? Ditto.

Beyond this, argues Barr,

It is not only Americans as taxpayers who are being forced to accept a broad range of increases in federal spending as the price the Bush administration extracts for pursuing its policies, Americans as targets of federal law-enforcement power are being made to pay a heavy price as well. The powers of the federal government--and, indirectly, state and local government, which often emulate their federal big brother--to snoop, surveil, search and secretly arrest people with no more “reasonable suspicion” than a vague notion of “preventing terrorism,” have reached not just unprecedented, but frightening levels.

More and more, self-proclaimed conservative intellectuals have embraced big government, since it is the Republicans who now control it and their own influence can guide policy, New York Times columnist David Brooks has written about “the death of small-government conservatism.” He calls for Washington to federalize education reform, subsidize new energy technologies and promote national service.

David Frum of the American Enterprise Institute, who called conservative critics of the war in Iraq “anti-American,” even asks why a federal tax “on calorific sodas would not be a good ideal?” He declares: “Big Gulp drinks and super-sized fries are making America sick . . .”

Doug Bandow laments that, “The Right has become the Left in Washington just as the revolutionary pigs became the reactionary humans in George Orwell’s Animal Farm.”

Writing in The New York Times, Alan Wolfe provides this assessment:

George W. Bush’s electoral victories speak to the success of the right in organizing politics, while demonstrating the left’s hold on our political imagination. Under Bush, conservatives became big-spending, deficit-inducing Keynesians. They offered to improve and expand programs like Medicare. When they attacked environmental protection, they did it standing in front of trees (the right’s equivalent of the left’s hunting permits). Judge conservatives by what they say rather than by what they do, and all their ideas are liberal.

Those conservatives who continue to believe in the ideas which motivated those who initiated what has come to be called the Conservative Revolution in recent American politics should be as opposed to Republicans who violate their principles as to Democrats who do so.

That government should be clearly limited and that power is a corrupting force was the essential perception of the men who wrote the Constitution. In The Federalist Papers, James Madison declared:

It may be a reflection upon human nature that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed, and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

The written and spoken words of the men who led the American Revolution give us numerous examples of their fear and suspicion of power and those who held it. Samuel Adams asserted that,

 

There is a degree of watchfulness over all men possessed of power or influence upon which the liberties of mankind much depend. It is necessary to guard against the infirmities of the best as well as the wickedness of the worst of men. [Therefore,] jealousy is the best security of public liberty.

 

Public liberty may now be endangered precisely because those who once warned against the excesses of government power now find themselves wielding it, and appear reluctant to relinquish it. What is important, in the end, is not which party is in power but how well limited government and individual liberty are promoted and protected. At the present time, the answer seems to be: Not very well at all.     *

“Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson