In the tiny town of Selma, where we lived in the late 1950s and early 1960s, at the cutting edge of what would become a tidal wave of Mexican immigration, we not only knew that our country was different from others, but also understood why and how it was clearly superior. And the confidence that sprang from such knowledge, tested by criticism and supported with facts, gave us the ability to counter the cheap anti-Americanism abroad, and here at home to create a real sense of national harmony. Like most other Americans we saw the McCarthy era, Jim Crow and the sexual chauvinism that affected the country in the early 1960s as symptoms of the imperfection of the human condition, but curable with work and patience. We were not tempted to believe that there were better answers in other systems elsewhere. None looked to Cuba for tolerance of dissent, to China for racial equity, or to the Third World generally for gender parity.
The only thing that made us Americans any different from other people, we were taught, was our singular Constitution and democratic creed, which provided a framework for moral evolution. The promulgation of such a pragmatic ideology relieved us from the ethical posturing that would overtake the campuses, or any bloody effort to ram equality and fraternity down the throats of our countrymen with the barrel of a gun. So we looked back at the bad moments in American history for signs of amelioration, not for evidence that we must become revolutionaries. And we did not inflate our own moral pretensions by deprecating our ancestors on the frontier who lacked our material bounty and technological safety net, but often possessed physical courage and strength that we did not.
I know from my children that today's students see a different picture. They focus on dismal failure in the American experience where we once saw progress. We appreciated the slow struggle of politics and culture to trump universal human pathology. Now they are taught that bourgeois liberalism creates a particular American malevolence not found in other cultures and nations.
The victories of World War II, the reconstruction of Europe, the containment of homicidal communism, and the painful effort to ensure racial and sexual equality of opportunity here at home would have been impossible without an America sure of what it was and aware of what it had to do. Yet the self-confidence that taught values to the immigrant has nearly vanished from our schools. The results in the decline of civic education are unmistakable. It is not just that millions of Americans do not understand fully the mechanics of their own government or the seminal events of their history - 57 percent of American high-school students, we were recently told, are now deemed "not proficient" in basic history - but that they also have little idea of what it is to be an American. Ask a high-school student to define an "American" and you will be met either by silence or by annoying catchphrases such as "diverse" or "multicultural," if not hollow references to being "nonjudgmental" and allowing others to "do their own thing." How can a society that is increasingly ignorant of its own past offer instruction to immigrants about the nature of the culture they must embrace?
It cannot. Consequently, we are left with one of the last great absurdities among the bankrupt ideologies and worldviews of the twentieth century: the present-day efforts of well-heeled elites and comfortable middle-class white teachers and bureaucrats to provide to immigrants desperate to become part of the United States every reason why they should hold themselves separate and not commit themselves to the new world they have discovered. It will be left to cultural historians in saner times to ascertain whether this self-loathing deprecation so endemic in the West today was the product of guilt over material abundance or of a genuine desire to reshape American society radically and by undemocratic means. In either case, the results of such bottled piety upon the immigrant have been disastrous.
FIVE
The New Gods That Failed
WHAT ACCOUNTS FOR THE erosion of the civic education so necessary to sustain a unified nation that has no common race or religion? The first reason for a rejection of assimilation in our schools was ideological. We have not yet experienced all the consequences of the big bang of multiculturalism, authoritarian utopianism and cultural relativism - the isms that tell young people that facts, dates, people and hard data are either irrelevant or biased, or simply not facts at all, and that to question such a dogma could be "racist." I have had too many young students who mouthed clichés like, "We don't need to study the West," but when asked what "the West" was, were speechless and could not provide even a wrong answer. We have experienced enough of the assorted isms to know that all such ideology is antithetical to the notion of civic education, which historically has been national, realistic and in some way tragic rather than therapeutic. The old idea was that we were humans, not gods, and so we did not regard history as an exercise in deconstructing the past by retroactively apportioning blame and praise according to present standards of morality.
In the fourth grade we were asked to memorize the names of all the California missions. Protestant and Catholic alike learned that Father Serra was a civilizing, if flawed figure who tried to introduce agriculture, transportation and some refinement to a barren California landscape. In contrast, later generations have been told that the friar was a martinet who whipped Indians and forced them to convert to Catholicism. Surely the truth lies somewhere between the romanticism of my own education and the cynicism of the current indoctrination. But what is missing in the new dispensation is any sense that the world in which we
