| The Awful Price for Teaching Less Than We Know
By Michael Winship
Watching Glenn Beck's performance Saturday at his "Restoring Honor" rally in Washington, DC, I thought of the novelist Sinclair Lewis' Elmer Gantry, the charlatan evangelist who seduces most of those around him with his hearty backslapping and false piety.
Then I realized it wasn't Gantry of whom I was reminded so much as another Lewis character, Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip, the politician who poses as a populist, then, once elected president, turns the United States into a fascist dictatorship, aided by an angry, unknowing electorate and a paramilitary group called the Minute Men.
Read how Sinclair Lewis described Windrip 75 years ago in his novel "It Can't Happen Here" and think Beck: "He was an actor of genius. There was no more overwhelming actor on the stage, in the motion pictures, nor even in the pulpit. He would whirl arms, bang tables, glare from mad eyes, vomit Biblical wrath from a gaping mouth; but he would also coo like a nursing mother, beseech like an aching lover, and in between tricks would coldly and almost contemptuously jab his crowds with figures and facts - figures and facts that were inescapable even when, as often happened, they were entirely incorrect."
Entirely incorrect. In its despair and confusion, a large segment of the American populace is prepared to believe anything it's told, in part because we are a country less and less educated, increasingly unable to tell fact from fiction because we are so unschooled in basic essential knowledge about America and the world.
I remembered a conversation my friend and colleague Bill Moyers had with journalist and author Susan Jacoby on "Bill Moyers Journal" in 2008, just after the publication of her book, "The Age of American Unreason."
She cited a 2006 National Geographic-Roper Survey: "Only 23 percent of college-educated young people could find Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran and Israel, four countries of ultimate importance to American policy on the map - a map, by the way, that had the countries lettered on it. So in other words, it wasn't a blank map, [which] meant they didn't really know where the Middle East was either ... If only 23 percent of people with some college can find those countries on a map that is nothing to be bragging about. And that has to have something to do with why, as a country, we have such shallow political discussions."
It's not much of a leap from there to the Pew Research Center survey earlier this month reporting, "nearly one-in-five Americans (18%) now say Obama is a Muslim, up from 11% in March 2009. Only about one-third of adults (34%) say Obama is a Christian, down sharply from 48% in 2009."
The jump in the "Obama is a Muslim" numbers is sharpest among Republicans (and a new Newsweek poll finds a majority of Republicans also believe that it's "definitely" or "probably" true that "Barack Obama sympathizes with Islamic fundamentalists who want to impose Islamic law around the world"). But as New York Times blogger Timothy Egan noted in an entry headlined, "Building a Nation of Know-Nothings," it's "not just that 46 percent of Republicans believe the lie that Obama is a Muslim, or that 27 percent in the party doubt that the president of the United States is a citizen. But fully half of them believe falsely that the big bailout of banks and insurance companies under TARP was enacted by Obama, and not by President Bush."
Back when Moyers spoke with Susan Jacoby about "the ignorance and erosion of historical memory that makes serious deceptions possible and plausible," she cited as an example that, "If we don't know what our Constitution says about the separation of powers then it certainly affects the way we decide all kinds of public issues."
According to a survey conducted last year by The American Revolution Center, a nonpartisan, educational group, more than half of American adults "mistakenly believe the Constitution established a government of direct democracy, rather than a democratic republic," a third don't know that the right to trial by jury is guaranteed by the Bill of Rights and "many more Americans remember that Michael Jackson sang 'Beat It' than know that the Bill of Rights is part of the Constitution." (Sixty percent knew that reality TV's Jon and Kate Gosselin had eight kids, but more than a third did not know that the American Revolution took place in the 18th century.)
So, is it any wonder that many Tea Partiers are equally unknowing of the fact that much of their grassroots movement is bankrolled by fat cats with ulterior motives like billionaire libertarians David Koch and his brother Charles, who, as a former associate told The New Yorker's Jane Mayer, seems to have "confused making money with freedom"? Or that continuing tax cuts for the rich while supporting deficit reduction are inherently incompatible concepts? Or that raging Islamophobia plays right into the hands of radical terrorists who use our bigotry to incite and recruit? Or that Beck just says whatever craziness pops into his head?
"It's one thing to forget the past, with predictable consequences, as the favorite aphorism goes," Egan wrote on the Times web site. "But what about those who refuse to comprehend the present?"
Years ago, I attended a rally protesting government cuts in funding for education and the arts. One of the speakers suggested that we boomers may be the first generation to teach the next generation less than we know. That often willful ignorance may turn out to be our final, fatal mistake, the greatest American tragedy of all.
=====================ooooooo=================
Texas Tall Tales, Myths and Lies
By John Burl Smith
Texas prides itself on being the "tall tale" capital of the world. However, today Texas' tendency of stretching the truth extends to textbooks and the education of students. Educational "tall tale" telling began in the 1960s in response to the demand of civil rights and black power groups to correct misconceptions about slavery and to include the contributions of blacks in American history textbooks.
Back then, Mel and Norma Gabler began to "review public school textbooks from a conservative, Christian perspective." Today, their effort has grown into a full-fledged movement to censor all kinds of information out of the knowledge acquisition process under the guise of religious purity. It is one thing to disagree with an opposing view but another thing entirely to edit that view out of existence. Moreover, Texas is not only censoring knowledge, it is substituting what people today think and feel should be the view of what and why people in the past did things or believed regarding social customs to fit today's hindsight.
A classic example is the Texas Board of Education's decision to exclude Thomas Jefferson from a prominent role as Founding Father because he was a deist or agnostic. What is probably more to the truth about their action is that Jefferson is also known as the "father" of several slaves by Sally Hemming, his slave. Such behavior on the part of slave masters was a general practice during slavery. Today, whites are embarrassed by this fact of history and find it difficult to explain this to their children, while trying to convince them that slavery was justified because blacks were inferior, beastly animals beyond the pale of human considerations.
Another obvious clash with reality and the facts of history is the effort to change the historical view of the Confederacy and the cause of the Civil War. Like whites across the South, who thought they were on the right side of history when, rather than end slavery, they chose to leave the Union and form the Confederacy, citizens of Texas find it hard to explain why keeping blacks in bondage was worth all the death and destruction. Their effort today is to put a humane face on the brutality of slavery. These same Texans are trying to hide the truth about the period from the 1890s to 1950s when whites in Texas lynched over 500 blacks (whites across the US lynched over 6,000) and not one white man was ever arrested for those murders. Whites in Texas want to rewrite history books so that rebels like Jefferson Davis, Gen. Nathan Bedford Forest and those politicians that led lynch mobs are portrayed as heroes in history books.
Then, there is the assault on the Bill of Rights. A part of their effort to "review public school textbooks from a conservative, Christian perspective," Texas textbooks will no longer feature "the separation of church and state" as an essential mandate of the US Constitution. This seems to be a benign desire but Texas Christians are being used to justify the creation of a theocracy. Understanding of the present danger can be found in Europe during the "Inquisition," when not holding the right religious views made one an enemy of not only the church but the state as well. This whole argument is aimed at weakening protection for minority views and groups. Once a majority religion or religious sect is established, the state can censor all others.
Censorship is a tool that a majority uses against minorities; it is a way of limiting freedom based on numbers. As a result of efforts during the 1960s, students became aware of myths, misconception, lies and damn lies in American history books that occurred when information was not widely known. Today, Texas is engaged in a deliberate campaign to teach students lies in order to justify a political ideology. One cannot change history; they can only lie about it.
--------------- The DISH online at: www.thedish.org Vol. 13 No. 36...Dedicated to the Dialogue on Race... 09-6-10 =====================QQQQQQQQQQ================= |
No comments:
Post a Comment