The American experiment: Happy Fourth of July
Today’s celebration of our national birthday will likely include many things — picnics, parades, and fireworks, to name a few.
But not everyone may know what Independence Day actually commemorates. America’s founding is unique and uniquely important. And while our country is far from perfect, the ideas and principles on which it was founded still remain noble and significant.
This great American experiment has much it can and should still work on, but we are blessed to live in the most diverse, most tolerant, most religiously free, and most generous nation in the world.
It’s unfortunate there are those trying to make America’s complex history a single narrative of being irredeemably genocidal and “settler colonialist.” In fact, the soon-to-be-implemented K-12 social studies standards that now include liberated ethnic studies frame American history in such a way.
This “los[es] sight of the astonishing progress we’ve achieved through consensus and compromise,” writes Mitch Siegler of the THINC Foundation.
There is no nuance — and certainly no humility — for them; everything is black or white.
Not only is this wrong-headed history, but it is terrible for our children — and for the future of our nation. This extremist ideology undermines the very civic foundations that bind us together, replacing them with resentment, guilt, and even hatred.
The American story should be told “warts and all,” Siegler continues, but narratives that “propound heritable guilt and reduce children to static categories of oppressors and oppressed based on their identity” deny:
the individual dignity of each child and teaches them to view people not as unique human beings, but as avatars of religion, ethnicity, sexuality, and class. There could be no better recipe for division.
This Independence Day, let’s remind ourselves of our common humanity and that students deserve an education free from identity politics.
Below are some resources aimed at helping students explore America’s heritage, apply critical thinking skills, and engage in civil discourse to better understand the country’s complex history and what it means to be American in a pluralistic society.
- 1776 Unites: “American Heroes” series from the K-12 Black History and Excellence lessons
- Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism: American Experience curriculum
- PragerU: “The Independence Day Ceremony”
- The Tuttle Twins: “America’s History”
- Wilfred McClay: “Land of Hope”