Too many Americans think of our nation’s history as just a list of dates, places and people, without relevance to our lives today. That’s not only false, it’s dangerous.
One danger is that we will blunder into failed policies that we might have avoided if we had studied how similar policies failed in the past.
Think of ObamaCare socialized medicine, which follows in the footsteps of earlier, huge entitlement programs that today are going broke. If the American people were aware of all the original promises that those earlier programs would never become grossly unmanageable — but they have today — would we really be allowing Congress to stampede us into bankrupting ObamaCare?
Another danger of widespread ignorance of history is that it keeps us from appreciating our unique legacy of freedom. We could start seeing our constitutional system as merely one option in a sea of equally legitimate government systems — a view that is sharply at odds with reality and makes us far more susceptible to surrendering the individual liberties that made our country great and prosperous.
Recently, the nonprofit Lexington Institute think tank tested what Americans know — or tragically don’t know — about our history. Here are some of the alarming results:
* Eighty-three percent flunked the test — answering fewer than 17 of the 27 questions correctly.
* Asked which came before the Declaration of Independence — the founding of Jamestown, Va.; the Civil War; the Emancipation Proclamation; or the War of 1812 — not even half realized it was the founding of Jamestown.
* Barely half knew that James Madison was the “Father of the Constitution” — even though the multiple-choice alternatives given were Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Britain’s World War II prime minister, Winston Churchill!
* Thirty-five percent didn’t know the American Revolution started in the 1770s. Their other choices were the 1490s, the 1640s and the 1800s.
* Almost 60 percent did not know the U.S. Constitution set up a republican form of government. They thought the Constitution established a direct democracy, a confederacy or an oligarchy.
How will we protect our republic if we do not know the pain and the struggles it took to create it — and the blessings of liberty it produced?