Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Teach American History and Government  

John Adams, one of our great founding fathers, wrote this to his wife during the Revolutionary War:

“I must study politics and war, that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.  My sons ought to study mathematics, philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.”

This great country achieved John Adam’s dream, but somewhere along the line we stopped teaching how we got there.  We don’t teach our American history and government as we should, and the history we do teach is often distorted by our academics. 
There are a lot of ideas why this is happening.  I am not smart enough to know why it is happening, but I feel strongly that we need to change our education system to teach about our American history and our republic form of government.

I had a highly educated individual that I have a lot of respect for, respond to one of my blogs that all our government problems could be solved with three Constitutional Amendments.  He had a valid point, but I responded that it was not likely to happen.  His response was that it indeed was not very probable, but it was more probable than getting our schools to teach accurate American history. 
This bothers me.  Why is our American history distorted, and sometimes distorted to point of outright lies.
Thomas Jefferson is one of my favorite Presidents and founding fathers.  I just read The Jefferson Lies by David Barton.  I am appalled at some of the lies I had believed about Thomas Jefferson.   I would highly recommend the book, but it is not an easy read.  Mr. Barton’s research and documentation is beyond question, but makes for a tedious read. 

I am 68 years old, and when I was in high school I had a class in American history and a civics class, which was a study of government and citizenship.  Unfortunately, I probably slept through most of it, but I did get the basics.  Do we teach civics anymore?  I admit that I have learned more about our government and our founding fathers in the last six years than I learned in the first sixty. 

I recently received this test in an e-mail:

A Tough Test :

This test is not supposed to be an easy one.  The website reports that avg. score was 49% and college professors average about 55%.
There are only 33 Questions.
Click Below:



        I find the fact that the average score was only 49% a little worrying, and college professors only scoring 55% is upsetting.  These are the people teaching our kids.  I don’t care what their specific discipline is; they should know how we got the freedoms we enjoy.

        We need to take a critical look at what we are teaching our kids.  We must teach accurate American history and give our kids a good civics course or two.  They are our future citizens, voters and leaders.

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