Missed the Louisiana Purchase

The school put on an event to profile all the courses available to high-schoolers during their junior and senior years.  I walked around and marvelled, of course, as it was all rather different from what I'd considered when I was a sixteen year old. The International Baccalaureate program has them considering theatre and psychology and world politics.  English they can opt for literature and poetry or one that incorporates a broader range of sources and media.  American History is offered but last year only four people signed up and sadly, it was canceled.

What does it mean to be an American that doesn't know American history?  I could be snarky and say it makes one much like the rest of the nation.  But the American story as framed by the American education system is a moulding process for all, be they dazzled or bored when the Colonists meet the Indians.  As I consider it, having lived through our own miniature cultural revolution, at the same time as the "Great Proletariat" one that happened here, “Americanization” is a highly and necessarily a mutable process.  The pledge of allegiance endures, barely, but the simple patriotism of two generations back has been well diluted. Perhaps because the American experiment was something fashioned from nothing to begin with, unlike the tribal geneticism of the Chinese or, say, the English.

My kids barely know who Lincoln was.  Missed the Louisiana Purchase, and Monroe Doctrine and the Alamo and the Gold Rush and the wagon trains and the real trains and there must be a reckoning with all that eventually. People will assume they know all this when they're in the States. I can remember getting my hands on Howard Zinn's "History of the American People" in high school and steeping myself in that re-learning.  But there is no point in reading such a text if you don't know the basic narrative that it is unpacking, considering anew.

Tonight at dinner I verified.  They really didn't know any of those concepts, save the gold rush.  (Born in SF, I suppose).  It is my job, of course, to fill this in.  But there is the overarching need to fill them in about everything else, as well.  Homer and Dante and Dostoyevsky beckon as well. And there is some fundamental "American" responsibility.  I could go out and buy a U.S. history text and introduce concepts at dinner, but after one or two of these efforts I'd have noodles thrown my way.

In short, I hope that American History is offered and that she chooses it and that it actually runs.  Barring this, I will need to insert myself somehow in the time that remains.


Tuesday, 2/28/17