In his new book, We Still Hold These Truths, Heritage’s Dr. Matthew Spalding explains that American students lack a fundamental understanding U.S. history. Dr. Spalding writes:
The Department of Education reports that more than half of high school seniors lack even a basic knowledge of American history. Many college students, another study finds, can’t identify the Gettysburg Address and don’t know that James Madison was the father of the Constitution.
…High schools largely ignore, minimize, or disparage the story of America’s Founding in the classroom…We must reverse this course by making a commitment at every level of education to promote an awareness and appreciation of the true principals of the American Founding…The public mission of our schools in the past was to transmit this knowledge to young Americans as the most important requisite for democracy. This must be the mission of our schools again.
That’s exactly the mission that former U.S. Secretary of Education William J. Bennett has taken on.
Bennett has produced a series of history books and online curricula for students in grades 8-12, which are being made available this month. Bennett’s books are being lauded across the political spectrum as balanced, informed, and honest.
America: The Last Best Hope, is a three-volume American history series, covering 1492 through the present. Dr. Bennett discussed why he decided to write the series, which is being published and distributed by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company:
I wanted to tell the story of America…It is a story worth knowing; I think it is the greatest political story ever told…are there great stains on this history? Yes indeed. But overall, if you judge a country as you judge a man – in the totality of his actions – I believe it is as Lincoln said right after Antietam – right after Antietam – ‘We shall nobly save or meanly lose, this last best hope of earth.’
Teachers will note Bennett’s books are also accompanied by an online interactive website, called the Roadmap, which provides supplementary terms, timelines, laws, treaties, historical maps, a quiz center, and the Last Best Hope series in its entirety in electronic format. Students also have access to podcasts featuring Dr. Bennett, to enrich what they have read in the books. The Last Best Hope site proclaims:
The story of America is a great story…We have prevented epidemics, improved the conditions of mankind, and saved other countries. We have fought wars for ourselves as well as others, we have liberated, and we have become not only a shining city on a hill, but a place of refuge since our beginnings. America is not just the story of great leaders; it is the story of a great people 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.
That’s not the only version of history being presented to American students today. Leftist historian Howard Zinn has produced a classroom series based on his book The People’s History of the United States that has a decidedly different view of American history. The curriculum, which is intended for use in classrooms beginning in preschool, ranges from a lesson on which presidents owned slaves and the political nature of the pledge of allegiance, to “Teaching Economics as if People Mattered” and a “Constitution Role Play” to give “students a chance to see the partisan nature of the actual document produced in 1787.” This negative view of the American Founding and American values is in clear contrast to the positive, impartial curricula in Bennett’s Last Best Hope.
Hopefully the message of America as a force for good in the world found in Bennett’s new books – not the negative, empty rhetoric found in Zinn’s – will be the curricula that makes its way into history classrooms across the country. As Lynne Munson, Former Deputy Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities said of Dr. Bennett’s curricula:
I would recommend this as a textbook, unhesitatingly. It can be read as early as the high school level and would speak to adult students of all ages. This book conveys what so many of our textbooks today do not – a real love of the story of our country. I hope this book finds itself in the hands of many, many students.
Let’s hope students have the opportunity to learn from Bennett’s love of country, and the principals on which America was founded.
President Barack Obama’s $787 trillion failed stimulus included a $4.3 billion set aside for Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s “Race to the Top” fund. States that jump through the right Obama administration hoops can win up to $750 million in stimulus cash.
But yesterday, Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) announced that Texas will become the first state not to participate in this next step toward the creation of national education standards. Brooke Dollens Terry of the Texas Public Policy Foundation explains why:
- Education has historically been a state issue, with power in Texas delegated to the Texas Legislature and the State Board of Education. Texas lawmakers control funding and school requirements, and the State Board makes decisions about curriculum. All of these are elected positions directly accountable to the voters at least once every four years.
- States such as Texas may have to spend state funds to access the federal dollars. The Texas Education Agency estimates that Texas will have to spend $3 billion just to have the chance to access, at most, $750 million.
- The federal funding will dry up. As we are seeing with other stimulus funds, states and local school districts would need to find funding for the reforms after the federal money goes away.
- What if the “reform” could be a step backwards for quality of a state’s education system?
Education is a state issue, and the federal government has no business dictating academic standards or curriculum to states. Washington, please leave Texas alone.
It seems that if Texas continues to hold out on moving towards a national curriculum, Texas will lose points on its application for Race to the Top funds. Why should a state that has steadily improved the rigor of its own K-12 curriculum be forced to adopt national curriculum standards that have not been developed and could wind up being weaker than what we already have in place?
Since adding more math and science course requirements and college-readiness components, Texas is in the process of updating its textbooks and designing state end-of-course exams that align to the new curriculum. Yet if Texas were to scrap its own curriculum in favor a national curriculum, Texas would have to spend an estimated $3 billion – $2 billion to purchase new textbooks and $1 billion to redesign our state tests.