Happy Birthday Dutch

Today would have been President Ronald Reagan’s 97th birthday. Showing the foresight that marked his life, he neatly analyzed a pivotal shortfall in American education at the end of his final televised address as president in 1989.

“We’ve got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise,” he told the nation.”

“And freedom is special and rare,” he said. “It’s fragile; it needs protection.”

“So, we’ve got to teach history based not on what’s in fashion but what’s important—why the Pilgrims came here, who Jimmy Doolittle was, and what those 30 seconds over Tokyo meant.”

You can find President Reagan’s entire farewell address here. It is well worth reading. In it, he sums up his accomplishments as few historians, and even fewer history professors, have. Those achievements were, chiefly, the then-imminent end of the Cold War, the renewed American morale that went with it and 19 million new jobs.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.

Malcolm A. Kline
Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia. If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail contact@academia.org.