Image by Tess Brzycki
“When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it’s a wonder I can think at all.” That’s the opening line of “Kodachrome,” a popular song by Paul Simon, that spoke directly to many of us as young adults in 1973 as we were entering what we laughingly called the real world.
After decades of hearing rightwing politicians attack public schools, it’s easy to forget that kids today are receiving a much better education than we ever did. There’s a reason why students are way ahead of many adults in recognizing the existential crisis of climate change for the survival of the planet and the threat of political extremism to American democracy. It’s not because they’re being indoctrinated by leftist radicals in our schools and universities. It’s because they’re learning more about the real history of their country instead of being fed fairy tales about how George Washington couldn’t tell a lie when he chopped down that cherry tree.
Needless to say, rightwing politicians who built their careers on attacking public education to reduce funding for schools (and their own taxes) aren’t pleased about this tremendous educational improvement. And whenever extremists are angry, President Trump is always eager to inflame their anger further.
Mangling American History
Never mind that there couldn’t be a more unqualified authority on education than Trump. It’s become a highly amusing Fourth of July tradition for Trump to mangle American history on the National Mall. My favorite was in 2019, when Trump described Gen. George Washington’s military genius after he survived the winter in Valley Forge, crossed the Delaware and “took over the airports” from the British in 1776 to win the Revolutionary War. Who can forget the bloody Battle of the Baggage Claim?
In another speech on history, Trump cited Christopher Columbus for discovering America in 1492 after sailing the ocean blue. Actually, Columbus landed in the Bahamas, but he didn’t really discover them since there were already people living there as well as in America. Trump also paid tribute to abolitionist Frederick Douglass as “an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more.” Most amazing, of course, was that Douglass was still doing such a great job at the advanced age of 200.
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Ignorance about American history hasn’t stopped Trump from promising to create a national commission on education to create “a pro-American curriculum that celebrates the truth about our nation’s great history” so children will no longer be “taught to hate their own country… Many young Americans have been fed lies about America being a wicked nation plagued by racism.”
So there goes Black History Month, the shortest month of the year traditionally set aside to teach students that black history has always been part of America’s history. It’s tempting to blame Trump for openly appealing to the virulent racism within the Republican Party but, speaking of history, that’s been an intentional Republican tactic ever since Richard Nixon’s successful Southern Strategy attracted Democratic racists alienated by their party’s embrace of civil rights under President Lyndon Johnson. Trump was simply much cruder and more obvious about it.
Slavery, Bad?
In 2014, the College Board, administering exams for Advanced Placement high school courses, updated its standards for teaching Advanced Placement U.S. History. The Republican National Committee condemned those changes for including “negative aspects of our nation’s history.”
Ben Carson, an African American brain surgeon honing his skills for a second lucrative career as a rightwing motivational speaker, joined the opposition, claiming that, by the time students finished such a course, “they’d be ready to sign up for ISIS.” Carson, Trump’s kind of African American, is now Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, one of the few black persons in Trump’s entire administration. Carson was upset that Advanced Placement courses included “a whole section of slavery and how evil we are. A whole section about Japanese internment camps. A whole section about how we wiped out American Indians with no mercy.”
How many Americans are seriously opposed to students being taught about those egregious violations of everything we’ve always claimed American democracy should be? How can well-educated, responsible citizens avoid repeating the mistakes of the past if they never learn about them? Ever since the U.S. Supreme Court stopped enforcing the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision to racially integrate public schools, many schools have re-segregated. But that hasn’t stopped the U.S. population itself from becoming increasingly racially diverse, even in formerly all-white suburbs and small towns.
Education should always teach students about the world around them and how it got that way. That’s why they call it education. Today’s racially diverse students are fortunate to be learning a lot more than we did growing up about how to be active citizens and critical thinkers. We should pay teachers better for their priceless contribution to democracy.
Joel McNally was a critic and columnist for the Milwaukee Journal for 27 years. He has written the weekly Taking Liberties column for the Shepherd Express since 1996.
