Just read this. I knew there was a reason why I loved David McCullough as an author. In this interview, he takes on the way history books are written today. He attacks the lack of knowledge kids today have of the birth of the nation.
Something must be done. I feel quite frantic about it.
My public school education in the 1970s gave me a very good basis of American history. My parents, too, also loved the history of the American revolution, so we grew up hearing the stories of the Boston tea party. Longfellow’s poem about Paul Revere’s ride was a common bedtime story. We come from a Boston Irish family, so all of those events were very real to us.
Notable quotes from Mr. McCullough:
— “Something’s eating away at the national memory, and a nation or a community or a society can suffer as much from the adverse effects of amnesia as can an individual.”
— “History is a story, cause and effect. And if you’re going to teach just segments of history – women’s issues – these youngsters have almost no sense of cause and effect. They have no sense of what followed what and why, that everything has antecedents and everything has consequences. And they might begin to think that’s true of life, too.”
— “And so many of the blessings and advantages we have, so many of the reasons why our civilization, our culture, has flourished aren’t understood; they’re not appreciated. And if you don’t have any appreciation of what people went through to get, to achieve, to build what you are benefiting from, then these things don’t mean very much to you. You just think, well, that’s the way it is. That’s our birthright. That just happened. [But] it didn’t just happen. And at what price? What grief? What disappointment? What suffering went on? I mean this. I think that to be ignorant or indifferent to history isn’t just to be uneducated or stupid. It’s to be rude, ungrateful. And ingratitude is an ugly failing in human beings.”
