Cross-Posted from DaleGlading.com
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“The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.”
– Robert Maynard Hutchins
I know that I am not the “average bear” as one of my favorite cartoon characters would say. But let me tell you how I spent many a summer day and many a summer night during my childhood.
If the weather was good, you would most likely find me at the local sandlot playing baseball or in our backyard swimming pool. However, if it was raining or there was no one to play with, one of my favorite pastimes was visiting our local library. Once there, I would head straight to the biography section and gather up an armload of books about great statesman, courageous generals, famous inventors, and professional athletes.
And then I would return home and read them all.
Once in a while, my father would take me to a used bookstore on Mount Ephraim Avenue in Camden, New Jersey where paperbacks went for 10 cents and hardbacks for a quarter. And so, instead of an armful of library books, I would head home toting a grocery bag of reading material.
From the pages of those books, I learned (and memorized) the Presidents of the United States, the first five members of the National Baseball Hall of Fame, and the competing generals in both the American Revolution and the Civil War. They were my heroes and role models wrapped into one.
If the library was closed and my dad was too busy to take me to the bookstore, I contented myself to read excerpts from Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia. Two of my favorite characters were Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, and they came to life as I read their life stories.
I share these childhood memories with you to contrast what I saw on TV the other night. Returning home after a night of basketball, I tuned into Jesse Waters Primetime while I ate a quick snack. Thankfully, the butterscotch krimpets didn’t lodge in my throat as I watched a series of interviews being conducted with skiers at a resort in Vermont.
The reporter asked each person a series of questions about President’s Day, the answers to which my classmates and I could have recited back in Mrs. Brown’s second grade class at Merchantville Elementary School… or at least by the time we were in Mrs. Armstrong’s fourth grade class or Mrs. Thomas’s sixth grade class.
In other words, the questions were so easy as to insult the intelligence of the people being interviewed.
Who was the first President of the United States? Who did America fight in the Revolutionary War? Who was President during the Civil War and World War II?
And then, believe it or not, the questions got even easier.
Question: What couldn’t George Washington do? Answer: Tell a lie.
Question: What was Abraham Lincoln famous for? Answer: Freeing the slaves and preserving the union.
We’re talking Basic American History for $100, Alex… and yet, person after person got the answers wrong. And not just wrong, but insipidly so.
Did you know that George Washington’s job before he became President was a doctor or a boxer? Apparently, two different people didn’t know that he was the Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army and a plantation owner. Likewise, one lady thought that Ronald Reagan’s profession before entering politics was a caterer.
Either George H.W. Bush or Herbert Hoover was President during World War II and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s middle name was either Donald or Doolittle. The President during the 1980’s? Why Franklin Pierce, of course, America’s 14th President who died in 1869.
Most of you might think that Abraham Lincoln was President during the Civil War, but you’d be wrong. It was either Thomas Jefferson or Andrew Jackson… or so two different people thought. And apparently, Honest Abe’s greatest accomplishment was inventing Lincoln Logs.
Incredulously, one lady was so stymied by a question that she asked for a lifeline, as if she were a contestant on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
My friends, if we don’t do something now to educate our children about American history, American heritage, American values, and American exceptionalism, we are doomed. It’s probably too late to educate those simpleminded skiers in Vermont, but I still have high hopes for our youth… if only we can get them off their phones and into a library or bookstore.
