Junto Boys

A VETERANS DAY TRIBUTE TO AMERICA

Tom's story about his grandfather said this better than even Bill Bennett, but just to repeat the point.

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. 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. If you track education progress, you find that 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.

Too many textbooks on American history are politically one-sided. Worse, and more often, many of them are just plain boring.

Students in our high schools are rarely expected to read a complete history book of any sort.

We are talking about our country’s history — the country Abraham Lincoln called the “last best hope of earth.” We are 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.

With all that has gone wrong in our present war, 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 and great leaders, but of the undertaking of a great people. While we have our Washingtons and our Lincolns, we also have so many others — heroes in every walk of life, in every city in America. If we [study U.S. history, we] 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.

Why not invite a veteran in to school this week? 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.