Know Much About History?

If you doubt that America is in danger of losing her heritage, listen to the take on the teaching of American history by this country’s leading historian.

“We are raising a generation of young Americans who are by-and-large historically illiterate,” best-selling author David McCullough [pictured] said at a Hillsdale College seminar early this year. “And it’s not their fault.”

McCullough has penned epic biographies of U. S. Presidents John Adams and Harry S. Truman. The biographer related some recent experiences on American college campuses at the Hillsdale seminar, which was held in Phoenix, Arizona.

“I taught a seminar at Dartmouth of seniors majoring in history, honor students, 25 of them,” McCullough remembered. “The first morning we sat down and I said, ‘How many of you know who George Marshall was?’”

“Not one,” McCullough reported. “There was a long silence and finally one young man asked, ‘Did he have, maybe, something to do with the Marshall Plan?’”

And that’s history that’s relatively recent. As McCullough found, going further back in time elicits even dimmer recognition.

“I had a young woman come up to me after a talk one morning at the University of Missouri to tell me that she was glad she came to hear me speak, and I said I was pleased she had shown up,” McCullough recalled. “She said, ‘Yes, I’m very pleased, because until now I never understood that all of the 13 colonies—the original 13 colonies—were on the east coast.’”

The problem with the less-than-factual teaching of history today results from uninformative texts and uninformed teachers, McCullough indicates. Still, McCullough does not exonerate parents and grandparents who, the septuagenarian writer insists, should pass on the history that they do know to their children and grandchildren.

“The textbooks are dreary, they’re done by committee, they’re often hilariously politically correct and they’re not doing any good,” according to McCullough.

The rejection of deceased white males for their dead-or-alive status and skin color alone has consequences. McCullough bluntly assesses the pitfalls of a politically correct reading of America’s past.

“You can’t understand the 18th Century, for example, unless you understand the vocabulary of the 18th Century,” McCullough notes.

Teachers with a feel for history find choosing among the current offering of textbooks a dismal task, as professor and author Tom Woods told me. McCullough concludes that too many teachers do not have the background to make that call.

“We have too many teachers who are graduating with degrees in education,” McCullough said. “They go to schools of education or they major in education, and they graduate knowing something called education, but they don’t know a subject.”

McCullough, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, does not fall prey to the same trap. He has been known to spend a decade researching one of his books, drawing valuable lessons he eagerly passes on to grateful students of all ages.

“We can’t guarantee success in this war, but we can do something better,” John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail in the midst of the American Revolution. “We can deserve it.”

McCullough recalls being stunned at reading this letter, just one piece of the correspondence he digested in chronicling that founding father. That quotation, McCullough found, also resembled a quote from George Washington.

“That line in the Adams letter is saying that how the war turns out is in the hands of God,” McCullough explains.

Malcolm A. Kline is Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.