[Rhodes22-list] Veterans Day

[Brad Haslett]

Just so there is no confusion, the Marines Birthday is 11/10.  My reference
to 11/11/11 in an earlier post was regarding Veterans Day and the 'eleventh
hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month' which was the signing of the
Armistice.  After WW2 we changed it to Veterans Day and moved it to Sunday.
Armistice Day is still observed in France and Belgium.  Here's a read on why
we should study history.

Brad

-------------------------

November 09, 2007, 6:00 a.m.

Teaching America
Do you know our heroes?

By William J. Bennett

These are tough times for, and in, America. We are at war, and we find that
war highly controversial. Many of our political leaders have record-low
approval ratings and too many are held in ignominy. Washington — our
nation's capital — is held in contempt, as a laugh line by comedians. But
perhaps a greater tragedy than all of this is that we seem to no longer have
any kind of reference point. For indeed, we are not living in the toughest
of times, we are not living in the worst of times, nor are we fighting the
toughest of wars. But try telling that to our nation's young people; too
many of them absorb too much of the negativism taught by our culture to know
this.

The truth is, we've been in far worse shape in terms of what we've had to
endure in this country — but we may not have been in far worse shape in
terms of what we know about our country. Too many of our high-school
students do not graduate high school, and of those who do, too many do not
know the basic facts of their own country's history.

This year's National Assessment of Education Progress (our "Nation's Report
Card") revealed that over 50-percent of our nation's high-school students —
our population reaching voting age — are functionally illiterate in their
knowledge of U.S. History. Tragically, students do not begin their education
careers in ignorance: if you track education progress in the 4th, 8th, and
12th grades with the Nation's Report Card, you will see students know more
in the 4th grade, less in the 8th grade, and are failing by the time they
are high-school seniors. Relative to what they should know at their grade
level, the longer they live and grow up in America, the less they know about
it. How did this happen? Why is knowledge of and about the greatest
political story ever told so dim?

Too many of our nation's adults have taken too dark a view of their country
and have not seen fit to transmit her story down to the next generation. Too
many in our culture would rather point out our nation's failings than its
successes. And in our schools, too many textbooks on American history are
politically one-sided (turning off those with opposing political views).
Worse, and more often, many of them are just plain boring.

Yet we know the study of our history can be bestseller material when
presented with the glory and romance that resides in it. This is why
historians such as David McCullough and Michael Beschloss, and networks like
the History Channel, remain so popular. They capture our great triumphs and
tragic failures with all the greatness of those triumphs and all the tragedy
of those failures intact — they don't redact, they don't gloss over, and
they don't dull down.

But that is not the history we give to our students. One education expert
recently wrote, "students in our high schools are rarely expected to read a
complete history book." That's a history book of any sort: a biography, a *
1776* <http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=0743226720>, a Bruce
Catton Civil War
book<http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=1898800227>.
And, a recent national survey found that a majority of public high-school
students are never assigned as much as 12-page history paper.

This is doubly tragic when we stop to consider we are not talking about just
any country's history here, we are talking about our country's history — the
country Abraham Lincoln called the "last best hope of earth." We are, after
all, a country that has prevented epidemics, improved the conditions of
mankind, and saved other countries. We have fought wars for those who could
not defend themselves, we have liberated the immiserated, and we are a city
of refuge for foreigners as well.

With all that has gone wrong in our war and in our economy dare I repeat our
merits and take a positive view? Of course I do. In the midst of a previous
war's dark days that had cost many lives and would cost many more — hundreds
of thousands more — President Franklin D. Roosevelt could still say "we are
a great nation" even as we fought for what he called "total victory" against
an enemy that hewed to a "pirate philosophy" of fascism, even as we had just
come out of the Great Depression. And, I remind that Lincoln could call us
the "last best hope" only three months after Antietam, still the bloodiest
day in American history.



But, America is not just the story of presidents. It is not just the study
of great leaders, but, rather, of the undertaking of a great people — the
study of great citizens who wisely choose how to save themselves and others,
how to correct wrongs, and how to preserve what is still the greatest nation
in the history of the world.

While we have our Washingtons, our Lincolns, our Roosevelts, our Trumans,
our Reagans, we also have so many others — heroes in every walk of life, in
every city in America. If we take on the complete study of our country again
— the good, the bad, and the sometimes ugly — we will realize that for every
anti-hero that we can be criticized for, there are hundreds of heroes; for
every dark moment, there are thousands of rays of light to be seen through
the passing clouds

Those who watched the recent Medal of Honor service for Lieutenant Michael
Murphy were awestruck by the presentation to this young man's family — by
hearing of how Lt. Murphy's "powerful sense of right and wrong," guided him
his whole life, and how he embraced from an early age the importance of
"defend[ing] those who could not defend themselves." "Murph," as he was
known by his friends, was our nation's 3,445th Medal of Honor recipient, the
highest honor our nation bestows.

Why don't our schools take next week, as Veteran's Day is celebrated, to
start a program where they learn about "Murph" and the other Medal of Honor
winners throughout their elementary- and secondary-school careers? Why not
invite a veteran in to school next week? Such study would help teach our
children history with real-life heroes and, at the same time, it would help
repay the debt to those heroes by transmitting their stories unto the next
generations. I cannot think of a greater way for young children and young
adults to learn history than through the stories that make our history — and
these stories deserve to be told and retold.

A time of war is a terrible thing, but it brings opportunities for teachable
moments, and it is about the best time there can be to make our heroes and
their cause teachable and estimable again. If we rededicate ourselves to
studying our history and our people rightly, if we take the time to look at
the entirety of our firmament, we will see what our Founders saw we could
be, what foreigners who came here saw all along, and what we ourselves can —
even today — see once again: that we have something precious here. That
something is called America, where young men and women sign up to protect
her each and every day in the uniform of our armed services. And it is worth
the time of every young man and every young woman in our nation's classrooms
to study why.

*—William J. Bennett is the author of **Volumes I & II of America: The Last
Best Hope <http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=1595551255/> —
a new box set of American history (including a special audio tribute to
Ronald Reagan)**. Bennett is the Washington fellow of the Claremont
Institute .
**
*