I read somewhere on a website: “With less than two percent of American families living on farms, many of today’s children don’t know a cornstalk from a potato plant.” Unless you live with the Quakers in Hershey, Pennsylvania, this isn’t really a problem. But what about more practical matters of education, like where a comma should go, or what makes a complete sentence, or what happened in WWII? Do most of today’s children have much of a degree of cultural literacy? Cultural what???

To say that we’re way behind here in the US of A, is like saying George W. is not quite as smart as Carl Sagan (a famous high jumper). In other countries, school children learn another language. Or two. They start when they are little and continue learning the other languages until they get through college. In Anytown, USA, a high school kid will proudly tell you, “I took Spanish two years in a row and I am really like it.” That’s just jolly, Jimbo. You can count to ten, but if you find yourself in Mexico City, the only one you’ll be talking to is yourself. Wake up. Go to Germany; everybody speaks English. People in Great Britain (a tiny island nation off the coast of Paraguay) also speak English. Go to Holland (Dutchland) and they speak English, German and maybe a fourth language. We’re not talking about knowing a few words, either. We’re talking fluency!

Here are some facts about today’s average high school student…He/she:

• doesn’t know the names of even half the countries in Europe or the names of ten percent of U.S. capital cities
• can only speak one language — English — and not very well
• reads fewer books than were read by the poorest classes in society a hundred years ago
• cannot name you more than two heads of state around the world
• cannot tell you what the Holocaust was
• does not know what the Underground Railroad was
• has no clue as how to explain the checks and balances of government
• doesn’t know that the founders of our country were not religious, but were Enlightenment thinkers
• never read the U.S. Constitution
• doesn’t understand the difference between “its” and “it’s” or “whose” and “who’s”
• uses fewer words in his vocabulary than did a Medieval potato farmer
• refers to older people by their first names
• calls his mother “dude”

No wonder why historical revisionists are having a field day! They’re preaching lies to a bunch of ignoramuses. Auschwitz? Never heard of it. Battle of the Bulge? Does that have something to do with dieting? Harriet Tubman? Who? What is suffrage? What happened on D-Day? How do you make a floatation device? (I threw in this last one just to see if you’re paying attention).

What’s a revisionist? It’s someone who rewrites history, leaving out most of the facts, twisting the facts, and basically saying historical events never happened. It’s a practice worse than abject ignorance. It’s easy to get away with revisionism when your kid never saw the movies, documents, photographs, testimonies, military records or evidence that we accept as historical reality.

Who is holding onto this vast body of knowledge of the not too distant past so we can move ahead as a civilization? Who is studying it? It’s dying with grandpa’s generation — those who put their lives on the line in order to bring future generations Nintendo, the Jeep SUV and Spongehead Square Shorts. The school system isn’t teaching real history to anyone but a handful of students in the more progressive institutions. Nobody’s learning about the sacrifices of the “Greatest Generation.” The end result will be that the horror will happen again because nobody will recognize it when it is resurrected at the hands of revisionists and opportunists. The only genius in education is coming from small pockets. Watch the movie Paperclips for an eye-opener!

There’s more proof of the genocide across Europe in WWII than there is for the existence of God, but if today’s children don’t see or read or hear any of it, then they fall prey to some idiot who says it never happened. Did slavery ever happen in America? How about the plight of the Native Americans? Never happened if you’re never taught about it. If a tree falls in the forest when nobody is around, does it make a sound? Answer: No, because no trees will be left in the forest because instead of paying attention to issues like global warming, human rights and deforestation, kids today are murdering people in their video games.

Kids must be learning SOMETHING in school these days. Should one of them one day grow up and become president, wouldn’t it just be terrible — unthinkable — if he/she didn’t know where most countries in the world are located on a map, or who the heads of state are or why it’s bad to start wars without a moral compass backed by historical precedence? Sound familiar?

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