By James Armstrong Americans for Prosperity-Texas
The common clich about childhood is that it was a simple time. But with the debate over High School History textbooks brewing in Austin these days I recently had the urge to grab my old social studies book off the shelf and revisit primary school education at Brentwood Elementary.
There are moments when simplicity puts events in the right order.
The text included the usual short easy definitions for kids to grasp words like debate" boycott" and republic;" words associated with the democratic process. But it was the definition of scandal" that truly struck a tone with the coming debate: A scandal is any action that brings disgrace."
The scandal unfolding in the textbook debate is the call for altering a history that was properly intertwined. The narrative of my textbook was simple; it followed the growth of the United States and along the way highlighted the people and events that made a worthy and significant impact.
But at this moment in American history it is fashionable to call for change for the sake of change. Our friends on the left are renewing their call for expanding space in textbooks for women minorities and
people of lesser known faiths.
I cant knock them for insincerity but as usual I feel that their motives come from the heart the urge to make people feel good and not from a logical rationale in this case teaching children the most consequential figures in our history.
And in revisiting my old textbook I find little fault in it rewarding people who became stalwarts in American history.
Martin Luther King Jr. was certainly included because of his positive impact on civil rights as well as lesser known men like James Armistead British Gen. Charles Cornwallis servant who was a double agent for the Americans and French at the Battle of Yorktown.
Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton receive their proper praise for leading the fight for womens suffrage and the text also included a Women in the Skies" profile on aviators Harriet Quimby Ruth Law and Amelia Earhart.
Along with satisfying conservatives desire for chapters on the ratification and importance of the U.S. Constitution there are odes to the labor and environmental movements. The left should sleep well at night knowing we children were taught about the formation of the AFL the long days at sweatshops and the publication of Rachel Carsons
Silent Spring.
Americans share a common history not a community of competing histories. To echo the words of Theodore Roosevelt The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities."
Adding more figures in the name of diversity might be the politically correct thing to do but it wont properly detail the growth of the United States.
If anything it reduces history to a hodgepodge of trivia with a dedicated percentage of space for figures included not because of the content of their character but because of their race or gender.
Let us instead continue to stick to the basics. Have children learn the meaningful and essential names of those who shaped our country and save the expanded lesson for later in their youth.
Keep it simple.
