What DO they teach them in the schools these days, part II.

[bunnyjadwiga]

I have said many times that the blooming of libertarians in modern society is evidence that the teaching of American history has been a near-failure for at least 30 years.

When the Internet started blooming, I encountered hordes of libertarian programmers, dot-commers, entrepreneurs, engineers, scientists et al (almost all male) who clearly had no idea what had ever happened to cause the U.S. as a country to drift away from the alleged ideals of our founders.

Well, ok, most of them had some idea of the purpose behind the 13th and 15th amendments, and they didn't too obviously have a problem with the 19th amendment. But most of 19th and early 20th century history, and, for that matter, literature, appeared to have escaped them. They couldn't imagine why the child labor laws existed, or why the occupational safety laws existed. They clearly had no idea that the long-suffering National Guard had ever fired on strikers (and some of them still don't know that it ever fired on student protesters.) I'm not sure they know what the Trail of Tears is, or who started that whole mess (though apparently they are familiar with the Alamo). They know about the efforts to ban absinthe (because they are similar to the campaign to ban cannabis), but not the fight against the opium derivates that preceded this. Nor do they know about the work of Sinclair Lewis, Jane Addams, or Jacob Riis. They have no idea that long before the World Trade Center existed, men, women and children lived and died in horrible conditions on that spot. They don't know about Standard Oil; they don't know about the slow, painful unionization of industries that killed people in their hundreds. They don't know that industries such as Bethlehem Steel used requirements to modernize plants so as to not kill people as excuses to move business to other countries. They don't know about the Triangle Shirtwaist fire.

They don't know about the Spanish-American war, whose political profile would give them a shock. They don't know why we pay for public schools. They don't know that the vast majority of federal spending (497.3 billion out of 757.2 billion in 2003) goes to national defense, not human services, and of the amount that goes to human services, a good chunk of that is Social Security and other 'entitlement' programs.

*sigh*

In 90 years, will nobody know what happened to the World Trade Center in 2001? In 20 years, will anyone remember the flood in New Orleans? Or will our collective lack of history and background have swallowed up those dead, too, like the nameless thousands of ever other tragedy in history?

They don't know how much things cost, either. A libertarian friend complained that only those with children should be required to pay for the public schools. They complain that human services cost too much, when the bulk of the budget goes to national defence.

EDIT: And last, and worst, they don't get that a corporation has "no concience to be tweaked and no buttocks to be kicked" and therefore corporations, under the free market, have to be required to do the right thing. Partially this is because they don't understand that corporations of the American type are not a law of nature but a construct of law, and further they haven't seen in history that corporations suffer from the same failing that causes horses to eat themselves to death if they get into grain storage.

Comments

[lyzrecusant.livejournal.com]

hmmm....I consider myself a libertarian of sorts as well. (I currently describe myself as a "Green Libertarian" - I don't know whether that will make sense to anybody else.) Basically, I am really big on individual liberties, where it is understoon that the natural boundaries on the freedom of any one person to do whatever they please exist where their actions come into conflict with the freedom of any other person. (Understand that raping or killing someone is a serious infringement of the victim's freedom.), and that by individual, I mean individual human beings; and corporations, since they are not biologically human beings or even any other kind of creature, but are comprised of collections of people, each of whom is themselves an individual, cannot be construed to be "invididuals" and such are not entitled to the same liberties as an actual human citizen.

And those two things, even if the same rules *were* applied to corporations, would pretty much prevent a lot of the earlier problems, because every single one of those, and all of the environmental cases as well, could be construed to be infringing on the lives and liberties of others.

Very good editorial though. I too have met the young (and sometimes not-so-young) ideolouges who have not actually thought something all the way through, with all of its costs and ramifications, but who, having reached a conclusion stubbornly cling to it despite all arguments.