Today marks the anniversary of a great and auspicious day in American history, and in the development of human rights throughout the world. But the odds are you will see nothing about it in the nation’s media, and your children will not hear about it in their classrooms.
The British had been moving steadily to reduce both the private and community rights of their American colonies. Eventually, despite the availability of an appropriate military base within Boston, the English General Thomas Gage ordered his troops “quartered” in civilian sections of the city. It was becoming increasingly apparent that the colonists’ liberties were being dismantled. To protect themselves from the escalating abuse, the colonists stored up ammunition as a last resort to protect themselves.
The National Archives describes what happened next: “On the evening of April 18, 1775, the British authorities, acting on information that a supply of ammunition for the local militia was being stored in Concord, sent British regular troops from Boston to confiscate the arms. Skirmishes occurred [the next day] in several places, most notably on Lexington town green and afterwards at Old North Bridge spanning the Concord River in Concord. The incidents are referred to as the Lexington Alarm and the Battle of Concord…The colonists felt wronged. They had been fired upon unjustly.”
Thus began the American Revolution, which eventually led to the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. Mankind would never be the same. Those documents represented the greatest single advance in human rights the world had ever seen.
But like much else in American history, this extraordinary story has been largely forgotten both in our school systems and in the media. There are significant reasons for that.
The concept of individual rights, the founding principle of America, is rather inconvenient for the prevailing left-tilting cultural leaders, who tilt towards collectivism.
Joy Pullman, writing for The Federalist, reports that: “U.S. civics education, if it exists at all, is being transformed into a political machine to push left-wing causes, undermine American government, and incite civil unrest, finds a 525-page report from the National Association of Scholars. [NAS] The ‘New Civics’ uses attractive, bipartisan-sounding words like ‘civics’ and “service learning” to trick Americans and their representatives into allowing progressive political machinery to hijack public funds and young minds, finds ‘Making Citizens: How American Universities Teach Civics.’……A series of surveys of adult Americans from 2008 to 2011 found that college graduates tended to know less than the average American about basic government functions, although the average American failed the test with or without a college degree. ‘[W]hile college adds little to civic knowledge, it does seem to encourage graduates to identify more strongly with the Democrat and Liberal ends of the political spectrum,’ one of these reports found. Younger students are no better. Although the Obama administration replaced national civics and U.S. history exams with technology assessments in 2013, their results were consistently poor: “In 2010, the last time the history test was administered, students performed worse on it than on any other NAEP test. Less than half the eighth-graders knew the purpose of the Bill of Rights, and only 1 in 10 could pick a definition of the system of checks and balance.”
This is a major problem for a country like America, the NAS report notes, because America is a country founded not on blood or soil but on common consent to a particular structure of self-government articulated in the Declaration of Independence.”
In a Fox interview, columnist Charles Krauthammer said that American students are being taught “about all of the pathologies of the United States and very little of the glories.’…Krauthammer was reacting to a Fox News Poll…in which 45 percent of voters said they were not proud of the United States. When the voters were broken down by party, just 39 percent of Democrats said they were proud of the United States…’They weren’t just out there rioting and sitting in, they went into the professions – the teaching professions, and they’ve essentially taken over…That generation of radicals runs the universities, they run the teachers’ unions, they run the curricula.”
U.S. schools should return to the days when young students were taught to proudly recite Ralph Waldo Emmerson’s epic poem:
By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world.
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Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.
On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We set today a votive stone;
That memory may their deed redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.
Spirit, that made those heroes dare
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.
Photo: Minuteman statue, usagovpolicy.com pictures