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Image:  Unveiling of statue: "Civic Virtue" David Davenport, @HooverInst, research Fellow at the Hoover Institution; specializes in constitutional federalism, civic education; in re: For too long we’ve not given our students a good civic education. Either civic learning, or we lose it all together. Currently, no real funding for it.  Maybe five states are awakened to the need. In Rhode Island, students have filed a suit in court for the state  having failed to provide a good civic education. We provide $54 per student on STEM, and 5 cents on civics. Teachers aren’t trained, are unprepared, can't teach. An MS in education is about how to teach, not in content.   Poor education leads to civic alienation, including low voter turnout. Howard Zinn’s book is massively historically inaccurate, an actual fantasy; he had an opinion and wrote a book to conform to it.  It used to be an accepted alternative for history teachers, but now has become a standard text.  One accurate book is Land of Hope.  Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story*, by Wilfred M. McClay https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/the-civics-education-crisis-can-be-fixed-without-congressional-gridlock https://www.flipsnack.com/six40/civics-report-final/full-view.html ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  .  . .  * “We have a glut of text and trade books on American history. But what we don’t have is a compact, inexpensive, authoritative, and compulsively readable book that will offer to intelligent young Americans a coherent, persuasive, and inspiring narrative of their own country. Such an account will shape and deepen their sense of the land they inhabit, and by making them understand that land’s roots, will equip them for the privileges and responsibilities of citizenship in American society, and provide them with a vivid and enduring sense of membership in one of the greatest enterprises in human history: the exciting, perilous, and immensely consequential story of their own country. “The existing texts simply fail to tell that story with energy and conviction. They are more likely to reflect the skeptical outlook of specialized professional academic historians, an outlook that supports a fragmented and fractured view of modern American society, and that fails to convey to young people the greater arc of that history. Or they reflect the outlook of radical critics of American society, who seek to debunk the standard American narrative, and has had an enormous, and largely negative, upon the teaching of American history in American high schools and colleges. “This state of affairs cannot continue for long without producing serious consequences. A great nation needs and deserves a great and coherent narrative, as an expression of its own self-understanding; and it needs to convey that narrative to its young effectively. It perhaps goes without saying that such a narrative cannot be a fairy tale or a whitewash of the past; it will not be convincing if it is not truthful. But there is no necessary contradiction between an honest account and an inspiring one. This account seeks to provide both.”