5/28/2024

Last week’s curation at RealClear’s American Civics portal starts off with Peggy Noonan’s latest column in the Wall Street Journal: “Teach Your Children to Love America.” She writes that though children love their parents by nature, they must be taught to love their country. But Noonan says that we currently live in an age in which children learn “that America is and always was a dark and scheming place, that its history is the history of pushing people around, often in an amoral quest for wealth but also because we aren’t very nice.” To push back against this trend, she gives parents ideas on how to instill patriotism among their children: “You hold pageants and parades, have them read poems and learn songs. Let them dress up as figures in history and enact great events.” “Tell the story of the American flag.” “Have children memorize and recite Longfellow’s ‘Paul Revere’s Ride.’” Noonan concludes by telling parents that they have a duty to immerse their children in American civics because “when you don’t love something you lose it.”

At Law & Liberty, Jesse Merriam reviews “Character in the American Experience: An Unruly People” by Bruce Frohnen and Ted McAllister. Merriam writes that they see America fundamentally as a “nation of settlers whose European ancestry and Protestant beliefs laid the foundation for future generations of immigrants who would later develop the nation within the culture that the settlers created.” Merriam notes that, overall, “Frohnen and McAllister warn against reductionist accounts that simplify American history, and in turn the American identity, to monolithic concepts like racism, nationalism, and Lockeanism.” Instead, he says that we must understand early Americans as being influenced by philosophical causes just as much as the ways of life they wanted to preserve for themselves and future generations.