Tear down this what? The common core on the end of the cold war
Townhall – Terrence Moore – 11/11/2013
The ninth of November marked
the twenty-fourth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, probably the most
important historical event since World War II and the most important lesson
about human freedom experienced within the living memory of most of us.
What, then, are the
high-school students of today being taught about what exactly—what principles,
what forces, which people—brought down the Wall?
Textbook that bears the Common Core logo: two C’s inside a bright
red ball.
On pages 403-4 of
Pearson/Prentice Hall’s LITERATURE, Grade Ten, Common Core Edition, we see an
editorial written on the tenth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It
appeared in The New York Times. It begins, “The Berlin Wall was bound to fall
eventually.”
The editorial continues:
“But that it came down as
bloodlessly as it did 10 years ago this week is largely a tribute to one leader.
Today Mikhail Gorbachev is a political pariah in Russia and increasingly forgotten
in the West. But history will remember him generously for his crucial role in
ending the cold war and pulling back the Iron Curtain that Stalin drew across Europe in 1945.”
So there you have it.
Gorbachev brought down the Wall. Why?
“As political pressures
began to build in the late 1980s, Mr. Gorbachev was left with two options.”
Etc. What political pressures? We are not
told. The New York
Times editors assign the words “enlightened,” “idealism,” and “pragmatic” to
Gorbachev. Indeed, the General Secretary of the Communist Party is said to have
had “a wisdom and decency that is sadly rare in international power politics.”
Ronald Reagan . . . His name
is not to be found in any of the documents concerning the fall of the Berlin
Wall. But on page 449, we do find, as promised in the Common Core, his Address
to the Students of Moscow State University held up as a model “exemplar text.”
Unfortunately, the address is so heavily highlighted with shades of green,
blue, orange, gray, purple, and pink—and so buried under the jargon of two-bit
literary criticism (central idea and point of view, methods of development,
organizational structures, rhetorical devices, figurative language, tone and
word choice)—that it is hardly readable.
Worse still, in the textbook
editors’ introduction to the speech, students are told the following:
“Led by Mikhail Gorbachev,
the Soviets were blazing through the greatest changes they had seen since the
1917 revolution. Although reforms were rapidly taking root, they were not far
enough from communist ideology for Reagan. . . .” In this excerpt, notice how
Reagan restrains his strongly anti-communist sentiments while still extolling
the ideals he represents.
The lesson? The enlightened,
idealistic, wise, decent, and yet pragmatic Gorbachev had events well under
control. The Soviets were “blazing through changes”; i.e. reform must have been
their idea. But things were not moving fast enough for the
strongly-anti-communist (i.e. stubborn, right-wing) Reagan. Nonetheless, we,
the editors, have found a rare speech in which he actually moderated his tone.
That’s Reagan at his best, insofar as he had a best.
What’s missing in this
account?
“General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if
you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern
Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr.
Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
Those are the words that brought down the Wall. But
they are not to be found in the Common Core and therefore in the classrooms of America.
The architects of the Common
Core plainly do not want the young people of America to read or to watch—for it
is on the Web—that speech. The progressive bureaucrats who are now in control
of the nation’s schools do not want the young people of America to know that
the Cold War was won on principle, that courage and resolution on the part of
Americans were essential to the ending of tyranny in the communist-controlled
countries and the protecting of freedom in the rest of the world. They
certainly do not want young Americans thinking that we were in the right and
had to be prepared to use force against an evil empire. Above all, the
arch-testers do not want today’s youth and tomorrow’s voters to know that in
this contest for right and freedom a former actor named Ronald Reagan played
the starring role.
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