Monumental stupidity

Some have wondered aloud what the fallout would eventually be from the absolute lack of focus on teaching history in our education system.

Surveys and studies have been pointing out for decades that the younger generations have trouble placing people and places in the right times and events of U.S. history.

In one 2018 version, more than a third of respondents misplaced the century of the Civil War, mistakenly believing it predated the American Revolution. In another study, nine out of 10 high school seniors couldn’t identify slavery as a central cause of the war.

Well, the practical application of not adequately teaching history is now coming home to roost in a monumental way (pardon the pun).

I’m not sure a word exists that adequately conveys this curious combination of ignorance, arrogance and willful stupidity on display by young people pulling down statues.

Clearly the “critical thinking” approach to their schooling has been a miserable failure; thinking requires discipline and a commitment to knowledge and evidence-based analysis. A little rote memorization about Civil War dates and figures would be handy just now.

The historical illiterates pulling down statues of abolitionists in the name of racism are all the proof we need that modern learning philosophies need revamping.

The foolishness of “useless mobs” has been a recognized reality since at least 400 B.C., when Greek historian Herodotus was quoted on the subject.

Yet here we are in the 21st century, presumably an apex of social sophistication in the world’s premier democracy, and we can’t find the collective backbone to universally rebuke these woke protester-vandals, who can’t (awful enough) or won’t (worse) even discern among national leaders memorialized in bronze.

It’s embarrassing, as well as disgusting, laughable and discouraging, all at once. It appears that a number of protesters are college students, meaning that our nation has invested anywhere from $150,000 to $300,000 or more in the learning of each of them.

Seeing how such sums have failed to produce fidelity to the most fundamental lessons — respecting property rights and freedom of expression even when one vehemently disagrees — suggests a stern, critical review of education financing is in order as well. At a minimum, spending small fortunes to teach and train children should at least deliver basic citizenship values and behaviors.

A rudimentary understanding of history would be nice, too, and not only so they can get statues right. The study of history, much more than the three Rs, broadens perspectives on worthy achievement despite humanity’s faults. It highlights the challenges of creating good government and a working social order in an imperfect world, populated by deeply flawed individuals. It’s a roadmap of the past from which we can chart an improved course for the future. Those who never learn the old path previously taken tend to circle back to and through it.

Most importantly, without historical knowledge of our national principles, the people lose the moorings necessary to perpetuate our self-governing republic.

You may remember Al Gore’s famous Freudian slipup on the nation’s motto when he mistranslated e pluribus unum as “out of one, many” some 25 years ago.

He couldn’t have gotten it more wrong. It means: out of many, one. The subtle difference defines diametrically different philosophical meanings. Gore’s gaffe is a division; the founders’ Latin is a unification. Young people who don’t manage to get that right will get everything else wrong.

Political pandering is based on partitioning, and seeks to appeal to every special interest where it is, on its narrow terms, regardless of the broader concepts of truth, logic and reality.

BLM radicals don’t want to hear anything contrary to their blind convictions and agenda, least of all facts, figures and context. Multiply that by the number of various fringe groups, and it takes a lot of intellectual contortions to support them all separately.

That’s one reason things feel so divided. As long as we permit political gains from zero-sum divisiveness, supply will follow demand.

That’s also why real diversity — in which differing interests come together within the framework of common central principles — is unifying and strengthening. It’s a national benefit, and leads to constructive mutual progress.

The PC brand of diversity — which focuses, measures, blames and demands by specific special interest only — is divisive and corrosive. It’s a national bane, and invites destructive discord and discontent. Once convinced any bad “-ism” is pervasive, people start to see it everywhere, whether it’s actually there or not. That’s how an innocent end-loop knot on a NASCAR garage door-pull gets transformed into a menacing, racist noose.

And in a time when news travels exponentially faster than truth, that’s how faulty assumptions and wrong actions get falsely justified.

History happened in its time, which means it’s ludicrously illogical to judge its events against another era. But rational historical analysis is real work. It’s much easier to reduce happenings from the past to scoring by today’s simplistic, single-issue “gotcha” litmus tests. Thus Ulysses S. Grant becomes no different from Confederate contemporaries, and his statue in San Francisco gets toppled.

Let’s put restoring history to school curricula primacy on the post-pandemic to-do list.