Un-American education
I just attended the end of year program at my children’s elementary school. I won’t run on here about how adorable my children were or how charming the other children ewre (accept that as given). Instead, I want to focus on the show’s content, which I found both fascinating and depressing.
A little background first: This school, as is typical for nice middle class schools all over America (and it is a very nice school, despite my carping about its systemic problems), boasts “character” as a big part of its curriculum. This doesn’t mean that character issues permeate every lesson or interaction with an adult in the school, which would make sense to me. That is, the teachers don’t use every history lesson to discuss a historic figure’s virtues or faults, nor do I see that teachers demand of their students’ every interaction a level of respect and kindness.
Instead, the school has bought into the “Character Counts” program, which has “character” taught as just another lesson, with the students viewing it as an abstract subject, unrelated to themselves and as easily ignored as geometry. (There are lots of posters too, although a friend has rightly pointed out that a school’s commitment to actually teaching an issue seems to decline in direct inverse proportion to the number of posters on the wall.)
This year, the school decided to integrate the character curriculum into the end of the year show, with the classes doing little vignettes to illustrate the various virtues, such as “trustworthiness,” “responsibility,” “fairness,” etc. When I first heard the announcement, and not having yet looked at the program, I instantly saw the show play out in my head, replaying the national myths of my own childhood. “Trustworthiness” could be Parson Weem’s wonderful story of Washington and the Cherry Tree; “Responsibility” would be Paul Revere; “Citizenship” could be about the Declaration of Independence; etc. Oooh, was I wrong.
Without giving too much away, I can tell you that every one of the vignettes drew from cultures other than America. Mexico, Brazil, China, Japan, Russia — they all yielded lessons for our children about the basic moral virtues the school was trying to teach. The school did not field a single lesson tied to our own American culture, myths and history.
I don’t think this was a conscious decision on the part of the teachers and administrators. I think, instead, that they’ve been completely Zinn’d when it comes to history: They accept unthinkingly that America is a nation without virtue. George Washington wasn’t an exemplar of honesty and freedom; he was a slaveholder. Paul Revere wasn’t a brave freedom fighter; he was a sleazy merchant trying to make money instead of doing the decent thing by shutting up and paying his taxes. The Declaration of Independence wasn’t a stunning moment in human history that turned away from autocracy and a subordinate citizenry; it was the opening shot in a sorry history of American jackbooted imperialism.
This learned, innate hatred of American exceptionalism is now seeing horrible fruit in university professors and media elites who want to destroy the one Constitutional right that makes America a better, freer, healthier nation than any other country in the whole world: Free Speech.
The New York Times has finally written about the Kangaroo Court in Canada that is prosecuting Mark Steyn and McLean’s Magazine in connection with the latter’s reprint of an excerpt from Steyn’s book, America Alone
What’s fascinating about the Times article is how it found prominent American thinkers who are anxious to jettison America’s free speech in favor of European censorship:
The Maclean’s article, “The Future Belongs to Islam,” was an excerpt from a book by Mark Steyn called “America Alone” (Regnery, 2006). The title was fitting: The United States, in its treatment of hate speech, as in so many other areas of the law, takes a distinctive legal path.
“In much of the developed world, one uses racial epithets at one’s legal peril, one displays Nazi regalia and the other trappings of ethnic hatred at significant legal risk, and one urges discrimination against religious minorities under threat of fine or imprisonment,” Frederick Schauer, a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, wrote in a recent essay called “The Exceptional First Amendment.”
“But in the United States,” Professor Schauer continued, “all such speech remains constitutionally protected.”
[snip]
Some prominent legal scholars say the United States should reconsider its position on hate speech.
“It is not clear to me that the Europeans are mistaken,” Jeremy Waldron, a legal philosopher, wrote in The New York Review of Books last month, “when they say that a liberal democracy must take affirmative responsibility for protecting the atmosphere of mutual respect against certain forms of vicious attack.”
Professor Waldron was reviewing “Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment” by Anthony Lewis, the former New York Times columnist. Mr. Lewis has been critical of efforts to use the law to limit hate speech.
But even Mr. Lewis, a liberal, wrote in his book that he was inclined to relax some of the most stringent First Amendment protections “in an age when words have inspired acts of mass murder and terrorism.” In particular, he called for a re-examination of the Supreme Court’s insistence that there is only one justification for making incitement a criminal offense: the likelihood of imminent violence.
The imminence requirement sets a high hurdle. Mere advocacy of violence, terrorism or the overthrow of the government is not enough; the words must be meant to and be likely to produce violence or lawlessness right away. A fiery speech urging an angry mob to immediately assault a black man in its midst probably qualifies as incitement under the First Amendment. A magazine article — or any publication — intended to stir up racial hatred surely does not.
Mr. Lewis wrote that there was “genuinely dangerous” speech that did not meet the imminence requirement.
“I think we should be able to punish speech that urges terrorist violence to an audience, some of whose members are ready to act on the urging,” Mr. Lewis wrote. “That is imminence enough.”
Just so you know, these are the professors who are teaching your children and the writers who are disseminating their profoundly anti-American ideology at home and abroad. And I don’t feel at all as if I’m lapsing into disproportionate ad hominem language when I call them anti-American. Nothing, absolutely nothing, is more American than virtually unfettered free speech. Therefore, nothing can be less American, more antithetical to core American values, than trying to shut that speech down.
No wonder my kids’ sweet little school, without a second thought, was incapable of looking to our own country and culture to illustrate abstract virtues. We don’t believe in ourselves any more, so much so that we are willing to destroy, not only the thing that makes us most American, but the thing that keeps us most free.
