The Fall'll Probably Kill Ya!

I read recently of a decision by New York State’s Board of Regents eliminating the requirement that high school students complete a year’s study of both US History and Global History in order to graduate.

Apparently, this decision is related to the so-called “Common Core” movement which – unlike Ebola – has reached epidemic proportions in this country.

As an old history teacher, I was, of course, dismayed.  But on reflection, the Regents’ decision struck me as a matter of little significance – something akin to the moment when Butch and Sundance are about to jump off an absurdly high cliff into the river below.  Sundance worries that he can’t swim, and Butch laughs:  “Why, you crazy – the fall’ll probably kill ya!”

This country’s educational system does such a poor job of teaching history that – unless we dramatically change things – we’re already doomed as a free society.  Of all the subjects which citizens can study, the only one which offers any preparation for meeting the challenges of the future is the study of the past.

For, if history doesn’t precisely repeat itself, there are patterns.  An understanding of history is, for a society, analogous to the wisdom an individual gains over the course of a long life.  Everyone makes mistakes.  Those who survive those mistakes – and learn from them – have a shot at wisdom.

History is a society’s collective wisdom. 

America’s educational system gave up on History during the Vietnam era, when colleges and universities expanded rapidly to profit from the tuitions of hundreds of thousands of young men who didn’t want to go to war.  Arriving in unprecedented numbers, this influx of students – whose interest in college had far more to do with survival than learning – demanded all sorts of absurd “reforms”.

Among these was the elimination of general education requirements.  Before 1960, most American colleges and universities required that all students take a set of core subjects – American History, Western Civ, English and American Lit, Composition, a couple of science courses, one foreign language to the level of basic fluency – even physical education.

Your prospective major made no difference.  Future lawyers took calculus.  Future rocket scientists studied poetry.  Everyone grumbled through calisthenics and ran laps.  And everyone learned a respectable smattering of the history of their country and the civilization from which it sprang.    

Which – in terms of the survival American democracy – was the most important part of this common curriculum.  Because History – along with its allied subjects, biography and geography – is the absolute prerequisite for intelligent, active citizenship in a democracy. 

It was probably a good thing, in those days, that future lawyers and politicians had to sweat through elementary calculus.  Higher math teaches humility – something today’s lawyers and politicians clearly lack. 

It was probably good, too, that future scientists, physicians, and engineers learned a little literature.  The more we push back the frontiers of knowledge – the more we find ourselves able to do – the more we need some basis for thinking about what it all means.  Those are the questions which poets and playwrights have been wrestling with for millennia. 

But what was indispensable was that all college-educated Americans – those whose educational attainments would make them the natural leaders of their future communities – learned something about history. 

History is the essential study of the leader.  Always has been.  Always will be.

Read up on any great leader, of any nation, from any period, and you will find that he or she not only studied history as a young person – but continued to read and study it as an adult. 

History teaches us many things.  Above all, because the patterns within and among human societies tend to repeat themselves, history teaches us to recognize dangers before they become obvious – or before it’s too late.

Some years ago, when reasonable people could still question the dangers of anthropogenic global climate change, I wrote a piece comparing Al Gore’s efforts to alert Americans to this danger with Winston Churchill’s efforts to alert Britain to the dangers of Adolf Hitler.

One angry reader responded, furiously insisting that Gore was no Churchill.  He missed the point, which was that democratic societies – confronted with a threat calling for self-discipline, sacrifice, and years of unrelenting effort – will go through all sorts of contortions to deny that a threat is real.

Democracies are fortunate if they have prominent leaders willing to risk telling citizens things they don’t want to hear. 

History teaches leaders how to lead – by adopting the successful methods, and avoiding the mistakes, of those who have gone before.

Lincoln was a lifelong student of George Washington – and, before taking office, he read up on the presidency of Andrew Jackson, who had faced an earlier secession crisis.

Theodore Roosevelt was a devoted student of Lincoln, and actually wrote a biography of Alexander Hamilton.

As wartime leader of Great Britain, Winston Churchill faced the necessity of pulling together a coalition of incompatible partners to prevent Hitler’s Germany from conquering the world.  In the decade before he took power, Churchill wrote a six-volume biography of his ancestor, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, a brilliant diplomat and soldier of the late 17^th and early 18^th centuries.

Serving William III and Queen Anne, Marlborough had pulled together a coalition of incompatible partners to prevent Louis XIV’s France from conquering Europe.

Churchill, you might say, spent the 1930s doing his homework.

A country led by serious students of history can achieve remarkable things.  A country led by those ignorant of history risks disaster.

Because America no longer teaches its citizens history, it must soon either cease to be a great country, or cease to be a democracy – ceding power to an educated elite who have taken the trouble to learn it.

By far the safer course is to teach our children the history they will need to govern themselves.

But to do so, we will need to overrule an educational elite which does not understand history because – having attended college since 1970 – they never learned it.