SOMETIMES I WORRY

The other night my wife and I were watching a special on the History Channel about what took place at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. I had missed the first part but came in halfway through when they’d reached the point in the program that they were talking about the attack itself. While watching it I was once again stunned by the bravery of those young men who were there during the attack.

I can’t recall their names at the moment but three of the stories they told left an impression on me. One was a black sailor named Doris Miller who had been assigned mess duty because at the time they didn’t think blacks were smart enough to learn how to do much else. Rather than focus on that issue instead this show mentioned it like the historical fact that it is and then proceeded to tell how when the ship he was on was hit, he jumped to one of the guns (the ones he wasn’t trained on how to operate) and he began shooting planes that were attacking them. He received the Navy Cross for his bravery, the first black man to ever have that honor.

It told the story of another man who was in charge of the electrical system aboard one of the ships (sorry can’t recall his name or that of the ship) that was damaged but still functional. He was keeping the electrical system operable because without it they couldn’t steer the ship. As they made their way to the opening to the harbor a fire broke out and the room flooded with smoke. He ordered the rest of his crew to go to the secondary electrical room while he stayed and kept things running until they could transfer everything over. He suffered from smoke inhalation but survived.

A third man they talked about (again I can’t recall the name) was on one of the boats that was severely damaged and sinking. This man had a wife and child who were supposed to be on their way soon to Pearl Harbor to be with him there. He went below decks to save his fellow seamen. They said that doing so more than once was far too dangerous to do. He made 4 trips below decks. Eventually he was overcome with smoke inhalation and died that day.

As I watched this show I kept thinking to myself how young all of these men were. They were all teenagers or just out of their teens. They had their whole lives ahead of them. Some of them had already begun to have families like the one I mentioned. And they signed up or were drafted and didn’t complain or protest or demand this or that. They served because that was what was expected of them as U.S. citizens.

Stay with me because I want to veer off into two other items before tying them all in together. Recently the Democrat Party has hailed the rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who claims to be a Democratic Socialist. In watching her interviews she seems to be in far over her head. She has no clue how government works in certain situations and has openly admitted so. Her views on socialism completely ignores the past where the system has never worked and has led to the deaths of millions.

It becomes a question of understanding and learning about history. And history is not something that need re-written but needs documented and then dissected with discussions about what took place. Instead those writing history now want to correct it, eliminate things from history books they disagree with and place the focus of history more on the social constructs they want to discuss rather than to simply document what happened.

In the case of those who push for socialism it’s an item that they know nothing about yet claim to know everything. And even current history would make things clear if they would simply listen. Look at Venezuela where people are dying just trying to find food to eat or fighting over something as simple and easy to find here as toilet paper. Look at the poverty level people are living in in countries like Cuba. To just ignore learning the reality of what is taking place or what took place in countries that tried the system that failed is showing a high degree if chosen ignorance.

I’ll never forget when my son who was in grade school at the time came home and told me he was learning about the civil rights movement. I asked him if he’d been taught about the bill of rights and the constitution and he told me know he’d not heard about either one. My thought was how can you learn about civil rights, where an amendment was passed that changed the law, without first knowing what was being amended to? That seemed kind of backwards. It was focusing the education of students on the social justice causes rather than on the history that led to that point. Where was the education of the basics being taught before it was directed into more recent history?

Again, history is a recorded document of what took place, not what you think should have taken place, not what you think was right or wrong about what took place but, as Jack Webb on DRAGNET used to sy “Just the facts”. I know, a reference that young people won’t get but it works. The right or wrong of history is something that should be focused on as a part of the education of history but not the main focus.

Which leads me to my third point. Education. While watching the Fourth of July spectacle taking place in Washington, D.C., this year I was listening to them play “The 1812 Overture” by Tchaikovsky. I’d grown up knowing the music and also playing it in band in high school. I knew the works, though probably couldn’t name a lot of the titles, of composers like Chopin, Mozart, Bach, Brahms, Mussorgsky and Copeland. No they weren’t something I listened to constantly by I knew them and enjoyed them. I knew about artists like Rembrandt and Picasso and Renoir and Whistler and Wyeth. I knew about authors like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, George Orwell, Franz Kafka, John Steinbeck, Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

I realized that I knew all of these people by things I had learned in school in classes I had taken. I’d also learned about them by reading about them or enjoying their works on my own. But I realized that in schools today they aren’t being exposed to these things, books and music and art that helped shape our culture over time. Kids are far too involved in the current culture but have no inkling of the culture that led us to this point or the contributions that were made by these people to bet us here. I asked those who are teachers and friends of mine on Facebook if kids were being taught these things and shockingly the reply came back no.

I was told that kids today are being taught towards test rather than being educated. If these items were being taught to kids it wasn’t based on the curriculum approved by the board of education but by the teachers who worked it into their programs. One told me he played music before his class would start and at times the kids would ask about it and this would lead to discussions about the music. I found that incredibly wonderful but felt that it was too little. How can we expect children to grow up educated if the only goal is to get them past a test? Studying for a test is not absorbing knowledge. How can they be prepared for what lies ahead of them with no knowledge but plenty of test answers?

Diverse enough? I know a lot being talked about here. So let me try and bring my scattered thoughts together.

All of this made me think about what I’ve seen taking place over the last few years. I’ve seen students being taught valueless lessons on college campuses and paying through the nose for it. The basics that they need to learn to simply survive and to get a job are no longer the focus and social justices and feel good classes have taken their place. This will not prepare you on getting a job, knowing how to pay bills, knowing how to save money for the future or any of the day to day things that make up living in this world.

In addition to that the molly coddling of students has reached such a weird place that it seems they will leave college with expectations that will not follow them. I thought of the college where someone wrote te word “TRUMP” in chalk on a sidewalk and suddenly students felt that they need counseling because they had seen it. I thought about their need for safe spaces because they can’t cope with the political discussions in the world today. I thought about their sitting on sidewalks to scream at the sky because they weren’t happy with the outcome of the last election. I thought about the one college where by not calling someone by the pronoun they chose and instead calling them Mr., Mrs. or Miss could lead to you being kicked off the campus.

And while I was thinking about all of these things I combined those earlier items in my thoughts. While young people today are in need of counseling over chalked sidewalks, the kids of the past had to battle wars fresh out of college, travel across the ocean to this country in rooms packed with people or live in a wagon on the way west to deal with harsh land and harsh people. I thought about those who died at Pearl Harbor and what they went through, the sacrifices that they made and how they didn’t need safe spaces or counseling because someone disagreed with them. They truly suffered.

While our countries education standards continue to drop other countries are rising. And those countries are teaching those students the fundamentals of reading, writing and math and an appreciation of things like art and music. This is not the fault of the teachers but of a system that rewards with cash those schools that stick to the script and follow new social justice guidelines imposed by bureaucrats wanting to shape the minds of children for their causes rather than provide them with a well-rounded education. Indoctrination rather than education.

Seeing the results of this sort of education on display with people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez makes me fearful for what could come down the line in this country. When will someone stand up and say this is nuts, stop trying to mold our children with social items and teach them what they need to learn how to live in the real world. Teach them about budgets and mortgage payments. Teach them about culture of the past and how it led us to now rather than just about the here and now. Teach them how to read and appreciate the complexity of a well-crafted book rather than just the latest James Patterson novel.

I’m hoping that somewhere along the lines thing will change and that there will be some hope for future generations. At present I think there is more hope for those home schooled or sent to private schools than there are for those institutions that rely of federal funds to stay open. Those schools seem to be run by people less interested in education and more interested in tests. And the teachers at those schools, many who truly want to educate their kids, are suffering as well. They want to educate and not indoctrinate. But their hands are tied by the purse strings that fund those schools. Hopefully that will change but at the moment I’ll just continue to fear it won’t and do my part by teaching the kids I can have an effect one, those among my family members. I hope that the rest of you do the same.