“The teaching of history, for instance, which begins in the sixth<\/p>\n
or seventh grade, is a shoddy performance and all educators<\/p>\n
now alive\u00a0 should, in fairness, be given the noose and faggot for it.<\/p>\n
I don’t mean such rubbish as George Washington-couldn’t- tell-<\/p>\n
a- lie, but the whole subject. Ancient history, dehumanized and<\/p>\n
fumigated, is proffered as a rote exercise in place and ruin identification,<\/p>\n
simplified battle plan, and old law. One long look at the murals of<\/p>\n
Pompeii would teach more ancient history than fifty years<\/p>\n
in such a classroom.<\/p>\n
American history of the school brand is a disgrace to the human<\/p>\n
cerebrum. It is taught as if America, an infallible nation, rose<\/p>\n
through heroism from dire persecution, with a shining and<\/p>\n
untarnished escutcheon. This is not the stuff to give drips,<\/p>\n
because it compounds drippery. In the first place , its inhuman<\/p>\n
excess of virtue makes it unreal and thus very dull. In the second,<\/p>\n
it in no way educates. To the mind of a future voter, the contents<\/p>\n
of a school history book are about as valuable as a knowledge<\/p>\n
of all the formulas for all the emetics in Christendom.<\/p>\n
Think for a moment of a few of the facts.<\/p>\n
America was founded by a multitude of discontented colonists<\/p>\n
and a handful of well-intentioned men and women who took<\/p>\n
advantage of a European war to free themselves of taxation.<\/p>\n
It was partly a godly land, but in larger part, a slave trading,<\/p>\n
rum-tippling, whoring melee of lawless opportunists who couldn’t<\/p>\n
get along in a more conventionally organized society. It stuck together<\/p>\n
because a few men with a few ideals, wily compromisers who failed<\/p>\n
to compromise, were backed in a civil war by the industrial\u00a0 half<\/p>\n
of the union against the agricultural South. In the American Revolution,<\/p>\n
our book-vaunted militia broke and ran a dozen times\u00a0from Hessian<\/p>\n
mercenaries and British regulars. In the civil war, our record of graft<\/p>\n
and bad generalship, of draft rioting and governmental\u00a0 mismanagement<\/p>\n
was unparalleled.<\/p>\n
The conquest of the West was, again, the most brutal, brawling<\/p>\n
page of exploitatious and irresponsible rapine yet written by<\/p>\n
any nation upon its own population. Just in the process, a whole<\/p>\n
cross section of ethnology was pushed off the map: the Indians.<\/p>\n
Our part in The First World War might have been considerable-<\/p>\n
and costly in human lives. It was not, many though our<\/p>\n
monuments may be, and the multitudes of men who came back<\/p>\n
brought from the whole of Europe one idea that topped all others<\/p>\n
in spread and repetition: that the French were sexually perverse.<\/p>\n
We, who high-hat the British for their empire, have\u00a0 already<\/p>\n
taken the empire of a hundred whole nations of red men,<\/p>\n
together with assorted chunks of sod we lifted from Spain,<\/p>\n
Canada, France and Mexico.<\/p>\n
Such are a few of the nonglorious pages of history.<\/p>\n
Taught truthfully, they might startle the moppets into an<\/p>\n
effort to improve a society plainly in bad shape. They would<\/p>\n
give no smug sense of national grandeur and security.<\/p>\n
We need leaders to reform our world- but reform begins with<\/p>\n
evil seen- and not where the teacher and the book<\/p>\n
point only with perfect pride.”\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Philip Wylie.<\/p>\n
Excerpted from “Generation of Vipers”,<\/p>\n
published by Rinehart and Company, New York-Toronto.<\/p>\n
Islander.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“The teaching of history, for instance, which begins in the sixth or seventh grade, is a shoddy performance and all educators now alive\u00a0 should, in fairness, be given the noose and faggot for it. I don’t mean such rubbish as George Washington-couldn’t- tell- a- lie, but the whole subject. Ancient history, dehumanized and fumigated, is … Continue reading “Wylie”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-920","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewalrussaid.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/920","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewalrussaid.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewalrussaid.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewalrussaid.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewalrussaid.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=920"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thewalrussaid.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/920\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":923,"href":"https:\/\/thewalrussaid.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/920\/revisions\/923"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewalrussaid.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}