Originally Posted by
bobover3
The average person knows little history of any kind. There's no special ignorance of non-American or non-European history. Most people know little beyond what they've personally experienced plus a garbled version of the fictions they've seen on TV or the movies. It's easy to create "history" by placing a fiction in a TV show or movie. Then most people will say they know it. I've met few Americans with any knowledge of American history beyond a few popular myths, and fewer still who know anything at all about contemporary Europe, let alone European history.
The idea that there's a selective ignorance of the history of "people of color," and also women, flies in the face of US academic history for the past 40 years. There are few colleges today, at least among those considered prestigious, that do not have large departments studying all the supposedly suppressed histories, languages, and cultures. Departments of Black and Women's Studies are both mandatory. Literature about Asia, Africa, Latin America, et al., is required for most freshmen. In fact, many high schools now include this material in their curricula, not wanting to be left behind when it comes to academic fashion and political indoctrination. (These curricula are predictably anti-American and anti-white, by implication, if not openly.)
Yet we continue to be told about the poor "marginalized" peoples of the world. Examine the course catalog of any major university today, and you'll find more classes and more faculty concerned with these subjects in total than with American and European history. Majoring in Chinese is "cool" today. Majoring in French is not. Ask any students you know at a major university.
So why do we still hear about the supposed invisibility of non-white people? Because it serves the ends of those whose profession is non-white cultures - it guarantees jobs, grants, publications, etc.
Now let me ask: go to China or Japan or anywhere in Latin America or Africa and tell me if the people there scorn their own histories and languages as we do ours. Do they scant their own histories as we do, or is it considered an obvious necessity for people to be well versed in their own culture, supplemented with knowledge of others? I understand that all Chinese students are taught English. Does this mean they don't spend more time with Chinese language, history, and culture?
Every nation has a history whose passage from one generation to the next is essential to the very survival of that nation as a nation. Every nation determined to endure is careful to teach its children what it means to belong to that nation.
Perhaps it's no surprise that the anti-American left is determined to minimize the teaching of American history. When I went to school I studied US history every year from 1st grade through high school. The need was considered obvious. Today, I understand that "world history," in which US history plays but a small part often supplants US history entirely. Again, let me ask about the curricula in other countries. Do they not consider it essential to pass on their own history?
But Slammr is right that US history is a tapestry woven of many separate peoples, all of whom became American despite where they came from. The history of all these peoples needs to be told in the context of the history of which it was a part. Atomizing and Balkanizing the US may be an objective of the left (divide and conquer), but we should pay it no mind. Rather, we should strive to undo the harm that has already been done to generations of America's young in the name of long-outdated agendas from the 1960s.
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Re: I Wonder
A petulant demiurge has enslaved my spirit in physical form.
