Remember Pearl Harbor, and the rest of America's past, too

Pearl Harbor became history a long time ago – 70 years ago today, to be exact. The people who lived through it are now passing into history themselves.

According to CNN, the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association will disband as of the end of this month because of waning membership. World War II veterans in general are quickly disappearing.

“Remember Pearl Harbor,” was one of the rallying cries of the war. But the passing of “the greatest generation” means that the Japanese surprise attack – and the rest of the conflict – will soon exist only in mind, not memory. And only in the minds of people with at least some comprehension of American history.

Yet the evidence suggests that the United States generally does a mediocre job – at best – of teaching young Americans about the past.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress – a test with rigorous standards – reports low levels of historical knowledge among high schoolers. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute, an outfit that pushes for civic literacy, routinely gripes about students who know vastly more about video games and other pop entertainment than they do about the world they live in.

One survey it sponsored in 2007 – conducted by the University of Connecticut – found that at some elite universities, students were actually graduating with LESS historical understanding than they entered with. “Negative learning,” the institute called it.

In the K-12 system, educators complain about dull textbooks that tiptoe past discussions that might pack the next school board meeting with angry traditionalists, ethnic minorities, superpatriots, multiculturalists, feminists, champions of the religious right or secularists of the anti-religious left.

Students too often wind up with the impression that “history” is a dull list of dates and names and events.

In dummy U.S. history, World War II consists of airplanes dropping lots of bombs, Japanese-Americans getting interned, armies shooting at each other, Hitler exterminating Jews, and America destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic explosives.

That all happened, unless you listen to Holocaust deniers. But the story becomes far more interesting when put in a global perspective and told through the eyes of individual humans swept up in the cataclysm. Just as interesting are the arguments about why it all happened and what it all meant for America.

Historical amnesia produces incompetent citizens. George Orwell summed up the stakes in “1984”:

“And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ ”

Remember Pearl Harbor. It’s a good place to start.