Traditional School Holidays Under Attack
By Ari Kaufman (02/05/06)
"Progressive" education has led our students to be deprived of celebrating the great men we all admired as youths.
I have witnessed much progress in my life: two super bowl titles by my favorite football team, a world series title in Boston, US victory in three Wars, the invention of the internet, the Wild Card and the debit card; but it's hard for me to figure out when, where and how the United States went from having a school holiday on Christ! opher Columbus Day (the founder of this great Nation), to blatantly dismissing it in favor of Martin Luther King Day and, in California, Cesar Chavez Day. Rosa Parks is undoubtedly waiting in the wings.
I think it all comes back to Howard Zinn's "People's History" books, trying passiona! tely to conjure up a bunch of whirlwind arguments with scarce basis nor valid proof in history, nor living eye witnesses, that Columbus and his men savagely murdered totally innocuous Native Americans, simply to steal land for their own benefit. (Ch. 1, Zinn's "People's History of the US"). Revisionist History and Ethnic Studies instructors at most public schools and colleges (including mine) now take pleasure in driving theories like these home when assigning and discussing that book, alongside "Lies my Teacher Told Me" (required in nearly all college freshman classes), as well as quasi-leftist Middle and High School Teachers tabulating kids votes on who really discovered America, next to Columbus's villainous status in history, plastering them side-by-side on the wall. I am sure it's democratic when all the 8th grade classrooms tallies at a Middle School essentially look like this:
Christopher Columbus: Hero or Villain?:
Hero 3 Villain 147
To placate me and say that no swaying nor biases were added into that equation is ludicrous. Kids are impressionable, from kindergarten through college. Like my lucid-thinking college roommate always told me, "Ari, you are a Rational Conservative teacher; you are our only hope!" It! was so true, especially in Los Angeles, where I taught for five years. Part of me feels I should return to teaching at some point, solely to teach proper, traditional US History in any big city high school. I used to hear myself being summoned in the night by great men and soldiers from our nation's past.
And, no, on the second Monday in October, we did not have school when I was a student; and, YES, by the time I was in college and then a teacher, we did have school on that Monday. I fear the only city school districts that still celebrate Columbus Day are in New York and Boston, solely due to the heavy Italian population. And, yes, on Columbus Day, I was certain to discuss his factual place in history. And, no, I doubt anyone else at my school did unless they bashed him; and finally, no, there was nary a mention of him when we did the flag salute as a school that morning each year (many teachers who refuse to say the words or put their hand over their heart - and that's just bad when you consider the ages and makeup of my elementary school). Most of my fourth graders had already been brainwashed into vilifying him as a mass murderer.
This is not always the parents fault, as most of my students and their families do sincerely believe in the virtues and efforts that made our country the greatest nation that it now is (why else would so many immigrate here?), and always will be, despite what the skeptics say. Most of my students (100% Hispanic and African-American) were weekly church-goers, thus believed in morals, absolutes and not legalities and relativism like most present day educators and lawyers currently lionize.
These families, like families in the America's Heartland, believed in diligent work and Family Values. In the long run, this will hopefully tend to make them less influenced by the "victim mentality" that many NAACP-esque groups hope to keep ingraining. Much as the moderator of www.moorewatch.com wrote, "wh! at you have to understand about Liberals, and the Left in general, is that they see the world in two classes of people: the oppressors and the oppressed; and since, with their pacifistic natures, they'd never consider themselves the oppressors, they claim to be oppressed in most instances." That quote resonates all the way to the "occupation of Iraq" and Israel's perceived "occupation" of so-called Palestine.
To the modern educator, I am sure Columbus was an oppressor, as was Jackson, Polk, McCarthur, Westmoreland, Bush, the British and French in Africa, the Ottoman Turks, Austro-Hungarians, Romans, Egyptians, Sumerians, Byzantines and Babylonians. Now, granted, many of those groups and people were up to no good at all, but you see my stance.
But can you say for certain that these "vote for change" types feel that Saddam, Mussolini and Hitler were also oppressors? Well, probably, since those men were Fascists. However, you've have to be pretty gullible and forgiving to think that most of your hard-core Left-leaning friends inherently believe that Stalin, Lenin, Pol Pot, Papa Doc, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Castro and this newfound darling (30 years later), Che Guevara, were oppressors, when of course they were. They were no better that any of the above men; worse than some.
And really, what did Columbus inherently do wrong, after all? How were powerful empires like the Ottoman Turks, Greeks, British and French (in Africa and the Middle East) and the United States built, and how did they flourish? How was America founded and how have we hitherto thrived? Since when did Columbus's "misdeeds" become the focal point of the Pacifistic Nation?
Sometime in 1980, I gather. That's the year Zinn's "People's History" was first released.
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