My 13-year-old sons “social studies” textbooks appear to be written by committees whose chief concern is to dull boys minds in order to make them open to indoctrination by politically correct dictum.
Indeed, the very term “social studies” was promulgated by a Progressive Era committee.
“The social studies are understood to be those whose subject matter relate to the organization and development of human society, and to man as a member of social groups,” decided the National Education Associations (NEA) Committee on Social Studies in 1916. They thought it would be better to present history in the context of social narratives to teach politically useful interpretations.
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The bad idea soon spread across the land.
And so boys, now for more than a century, have not been told the real story about how George Washington had two horses shot out from under him in the Battle of the Monongahela in 1755, yet still attempted to get the stubborn British general to change tactics as they were being slaughtered, and when this failed, how a then 23-year-old Washington saved what was left of the British army.
Todays textbooks dont set the scene to vividly show how Washington rallied a frozen army to cross the Delaware River to take Trenton on Christmas in 1776. They certainly dont put the boys in the room to show an older Washington wiping his glasses as he made his former officers feel shame for attempting to make him a dictator or king in the Newburgh Conspiracy in 1783.
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No, all of those stories have, at best, become dead dates on a page.
The stories of adventure and human achievement are gone. In their place are narratives about social ills and the conflicts between races, men and women, the rich and the poor.
All of those are important themes, but instead of honestly putting todays students in the footsteps of human action, our boys are drowned in passively written prose, or worse, in preachy diatribes, as if to purposely uninspire them â or perhaps to safely, as committees will, navigate around the real things that teach.
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We now wonder why our boys are struggling in school. When we do, we talk about how growing boys need to get up from those rows of desks, move around, play sports and experiment. Again, that is all true, but no one is talking about how real tales of adventure have been turned into thin politically correct gruel.
Instead of just telling boys how many patents Thomas Edison had or simply reporting that he gave us a long-lasting incandescent lightbulb, how about telling them how he was tossed out of school for being “addled” when he was a boy? How about teachers explaining about how one of Edisons experiments set fire to a train when he was 12 years old â a period in which h
