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Our polarizing, paralyzing national feud over how and what we teach our children, could use a time-out for some personal perspective on our own educational experiences.
With educators, activists, politicians and parents battling over critical race theory and other attempts to promote guilt over gratitude regarding the nation's past, it's worth asking yourself: can you recall a particular teacher (or two, or three) who especially inspired or engaged you, making class exciting, even enjoyable?
For me, the most compelling memories about a favorite educator go back more than 60 years to my superstar eighth-grade history teacher, a peerless storyteller and jovial live-wire known to all as "Mr. D."
He could never teach his charges to master his full Greek name—Dianisopoulos—but all the other details of the American pageant came magically alive in his classroom, even for students with no appetite for dates, major treaties or the names of defeated presidential candidates. Mr. D. encouraged his pupils to relish their own role in the ongoing "American adventure." After all, many of us had grown up wearing mass-produced coon-skin-caps, inspired by the wildly popular Disney TV series that celebrated "Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier." But Mr. D. could conjure the larger-than-life reality of the Tennessee congressman who sacrificed a hugely promising political career to cast a vote of conscience against the Indian Removal Act. The excitement factor in each session of Mr. D's class played such a prominent role in many students' daily schedule that with our teacher's blessing we designated our time with him as "adventure class" rather than "history class."
Adventure stories, the educator made clear, could sustain your attention only if they featured heroes and heroines worthy of admiration. These noble qualities by no means demanded perfection; after all, General Washington himself lost far more battles to the British than he ever won. But, as our teacher made clear, the future president always "won the fights he really needed to win" and kept his underfed and poorly equipped troops in the field when no one else believed it possible.
By today's standards, Mr. D. might look like an impassioned patriot and shameless flag-waver. But in the early 1960s his attitudes seemed mainstream, normal and even nonpartisan. After all, America had recently rescued the world from monstrous regimes in Germany and Japan and now faced a similarly dire threat from the Stalinists who ran the Soviet Union.
When I began my year with Mr. D, the Republican Dwight Eisenhower presided at the White House. Our teacher, and virtually everyone else in school, expressed respect bordering on reverence for the great war hero. At the same time, another hero, Senator John Kennedy of Massachusetts, had won the Democratic nomination for president, with the chance of becoming the youngest candidate ever elected to the office and the first Catholic. His campaign gave out buttons and bumper stickers with the slogan "A Time For Greatness" with no sense of irony or exaggeration. Mr. D urged students to read Senator Kennedy's best-selling book Profiles in Courage, generating scant discomfort about partisan propaganda. Compared to our current political combat, when the two sides accuse each other of either drinking the blood of sex-trafficked children, or plotting violent neo-Confederate insurrections to destroy the electoral process, the distant innocence of 1960 seems bittersweet, almost naïve.
But several factors, difficult to replicate today, made Mr. D's "American adventure" both possible and appropriate in the classroom. The unity of the recent war years, and the exigencies of the Soviet challenge after the Russians launched Sputnik, would have made today's level of vitriolic and paranoid partisanship utterly unthinkable. Most of the fathers of the kids in my junior high had served in the armed forces (my dad went to the Navy immediately after high school), and that was particularly true in our San Diego neighborhood.
Strong connections to the town's Naval, Marine and Air Force facilities, and the dominance of defense plants (like General Dynamics, where my father worked as a research physicist), set a mood where devotion to sustaining the nation's power and security seemed like an unquestionable instinct, not a debatable proposition. After all, even Elvis Presley—by most measures the planet's most popular entertainer—had proudly submitted to the near-universal draft without protest, generating an avalanche of positive publicity.
That world is long gone, of course, as is the junior high school where Mr. D inspired a full generation of middle-class students to love their country and appreciate its thrilling story. But his influence lived on in those students' civic engagement. In 1983, because of declining enrollment in the Point Loma neighborhood, the San Diego school district closed the junior high while debating future use for the property it occupied. In a great and typically American saga, local residents—many of them graduates from my era—campaigned tirelessly to restore and reopen the facility. After 15 years of struggle, the school's determined loyalists won a decisive victory and the old building reopened as a newly cherished public institution. Meanwhile, the nation at large went on to deeper, more ideological arguments over education.
Today, history curricula emphasize white supremacy and oppression as the central, permanent, organizing features of American life. Opposition to this approach stems primarily from those who object to a distorted, monochromatic vision of our history. But memories of favorite educators who energized students in every corner of the country raise an even more crucial problem. If the American story must be taught as a dreary litany of cruel misdeeds, with an emphasis on hapless victimhood rather than heroic virtue, the sort of excitement and enthusiasm that gifted educators can convey would become officially disapproved, if not altogether impossible.
Any viable vision for the future of American education must leave room for teaching the nation's fundamental goodness and decency, as well as its giant strides toward justice, to counterbalance attention to flaws and failings. As Mr. D made clear long ago, it's impossible to energize a history class at any level without some focus on heroism and achievement, and we need heroic teachers with the inclination and the ability to provide it.
Michael Medved hosts a daily radio talk show and is author, most recently, of God's Hand On America: Divine Providence in the Modern Era. Follow him on Twitter: @MedvedSHOW.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
