Remember...
Ask a college freshman about the American founding and you may get a fluent answer in under a minute. The trouble is, he may never have made any of it his own. He has not read it, copied it into a notebook, or argued it at a dinner table. He has retrieved it. And what is retrieved on demand is rarely kept. And trust me, we’re gonna get back to the whole students and A.I. thing. But I digress… Recently , the Hall-of-Fame historian Allen Guelzo (who is another favorite of this website), argued that a republic which forgets its past becomes easy prey for tyrants and conspiracy theorists. As usual, Guelzo is right, and the evidence is grim: history squeezed out of the schools, proficiency scores in free fall, students who can no longer read cursive, let alone entire books, at all, etc., etc. His prescription is a return to teaching history. Preach, Professor !! I believe he is more than correct (although I admit to a certain bias), and I would like to carry...