It's a given that every citizen in a democratic republic must be well-versed in civics and history to fully understand national issues as well as global affairs. However, stuffing more American history and civics classes into already crowded high school curricula is exactly the wrong way to accomplish that worthwhile mission.
Beefing up those areas in the nation's high schools likely would mean force-feeding our nation's youth more of the politically correct pablum already decreed by such stifling bureaucratic bastions as the U.S. Department of Education and its state equivalents.
In fact, teaching teenagers to be better citizens--if that is possible--should be better left to parents and other family members, the local school board, and even community organizations such as the Scouts and Rotarians.
Instead, history and government courses are too often taught in public schools as a continuing series of human rights abuses--against Native Americans, Mexicans, African Americans, Irish and Italian immigrants, women and most recently, the lesbian, gay and transgender communities.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting schools should teach a bowdlerized form of patriotism that presents an America free of all its warts. By all means, we should recognize ours flaws at home and costly mistakes abroad. But we should also recognize that our founders were wise--exceptionally well-read and learned even by present-day standards.
They created a system of government that was self-correcting and remains so to this day. The result is that our country has continued--although often belatedly--to correct past mistakes in its 239-year quest to create a more perfect union.
Unfortunately, imposing more American history and civics classes on today's restless students--as translated by professional pedagogues in Washington--likely will only make things worse.
A glaring example is the community service requirement now imposed on students in some 83 percent of the nation's public school districts. The requirement violates our Constitution's ringing declaration of individual freedom. It forces students to spend numerous hours each month away from the classroom engaging in government-approved public service projects.
Now there's even a push to require all high school seniors to pass the same citizenship test required of immigrants to America. This despite the fact that more than 90 percent of recent high school students have spent a semester studying civics and a majority have spent a year studying American history.
As Peter Levine, an associate dean for research at Boston's Tufts University, recently pointed out: "Requiring students to pass a citizenship exam will reduce both the amount and quality of civic education in our schools."
The problem with civics is not that we fail to teach it, he says. "The problem is that civics is often viewed as a set of disconnected facts, not as a challenging and inspiring subject that will continue to interest us after high school."
He's right, and that's exactly why the curricula for American history should be formulated at the local, not national, level.
In the Baltimore area where I live, the highlights of rich local history become even more fascinating when linked to those of the nation. Consider just a few: the voyages of discovery and mapping of Chesapeake Bay by Capt. John Smith, the founding of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad that hastened the way west for early pioneers; the bombardment of Fort McHenry in the War of 1812 that inspired Francis Scott Key to write the National Anthem; Baltimore's key role in the Civil War; and the iconoclastic writings of the Sage of Baltimore, H.L. Mencken. And on and on.
Applied across the U.S., this approach can make history come alive.
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Whitt Flora, an independent journalist, is a former chief congressional correspondent for Aviation & Space Technology Magazine and a former White House correspondent for the Columbus Dispatch.
Editorial on 03/28/2015