September 13, 2008
ONE OF THE REASONS THE LEFT AND LIBERTARIANS ARE SO JUVENILE...:
Don’t Know Much About History: A national shame. (Thomas F. Madden, 9/12/08, National Review)
Which brings up an interesting question: If history is such a good teacher, why do we teach so little of it to our young?Take, for example, history’s place in America’s higher education. Many institutions that are training tomorrow’s leaders don’t seem to think that history is just what they need. At Princeton, for example, those who receive A.B. degrees need take only one course in history — any history. Bachelor of Science students at Princeton can skip history altogether. So can those at Yale. At least Harvard requires its undergraduates to take a pre-modern history course. But that is rare. It’s increasingly difficult today to find a college or university that requires students to study Antiquity, or the Middle Ages, or the Renaissance, or anything at all that occurred before the students’ own short lives. [...]
For too many Americans, the lessons of the past are restricted to the tiny portion of it with which they have personal experience.
Think about it. During the national debates on the war on terror, lessons from history were as thick in the air as rocket-propelled grenades in Iraq. Liberals launched salvos of Vietnam, arguing that Iraq and Afghanistan were unwinnable quagmires. Conservatives fired back with World War II, insisting that appeasement only emboldens the enemy.
Yet both of those wars are still within living memory. They occurred within the last few seconds of recorded history’s day. What about the rest of human experience? Relying on recent events to teach us historical truths is a perilous business. History needs room — lots of room — for perspective. Divining lessons from the experiences of the last few generations is like describing a Monet landscape with one’s nose touching the canvas. Those colors and dabs are pretty, but they just won’t make sense until you back up and experience them from a distance.
...is that need to measure everything by their own experiences, rather than consider history, which, after all, only happened to the meaningless others.