Teacher promotes return of Western Civ

COEUR d’ALENE — A local schoolteacher is on a mission to reintroduce Western civilization to every high school student in Idaho. In his opinion, the stakes are high.

“I would rather live in a world that takes on Western liberal values than a world that takes on Western totalitarianism. Those are the choices,” said local resident Ralph Ginorio. Students get only scanty servings of those liberal values in Idaho’s educational system, he said.

Ginorio wants the state to add two Western civilization courses to its high school graduation requirements. He currently teaches two such courses at Coeur d’Alene Charter Academy, where students learn more than the American history lessons currently required by the state. Ginorio teaches freshmen ancient and medieval history, and teaches sophomores modern European history from the Renaissance to the present day.

Ginorio has taught history since 2000, first in Maine and since 2014 in Idaho. Teaching American history without teaching where its ideals came from makes students civic illiterates, he said.

Students today need to know about Cincinnatus, and Marathon, and Hammurabi, in order to grasp where their liberties came from, he said.

“Unless we teach our successors who we are, they will not take their place as members of the West,” said Ginorio.

The lessons of Western history used to unite Americans across the political spectrum, Ginorio said. He believes that their absence has contributed to the current political divide.

“We have a country where people are more divided than ever because what we focus on is what divides us. Western civilization unifies us, with all of its sins and all of its glories,” he said. “It’s something that we share in common. We have a common heritage that’s pretty exceptional.”

Ginorio said that thanks to the West’s religious heritage, which he attributed to Judaism and Christianity, people today now enjoy individual liberties that were once unthinkable in other civilizations. The Western ideal of the worth of each individual human being has spilled over into other parts of the world to such an extent that those civilizations are wrestling with how to apply those ideals in their own contexts. Conversely, Ginorio warned, they are also lured by totalitarian theories which came out of Western history such as communism.

Western civilization courses began disappearing from America’s top universities beginning in the late 1980s, when activist Jesse Jackson alleged that such courses reinforced racism. According to a 2010 National Association of Scholars study, in 1964 10 of America’s top 50 universities required two semesters of Western civilization courses to graduate, and the other 40 familiarized students with Western history through other courses. By 2010, none of them required Western civilization courses to graduate, and only 32 percent even offered any form of the courses. In 2016, 85 percent of Stanford students rejected a student-led bid to reintroduce the courses.

A Feb. 22, 2016 Stanford Daily editorial cited the same reasoning as Jackson’s earlier campaign, saying that “The way to encourage meaningful engagement with the problems of our time is not through a series which lauds the systems that created these problems in the first place,” and calling for “more queer and trans faculty, indigenous faculty and faculty of color, and faculty who have dedicated experience in addressing tough questions about white supremacy, colonialism and capitalism within their fields.”

Ginorio countered allegations of racism, sexism, homophobia, and economic exploitation by explaining, “Western civilization has done something unique. It has created a functional society not based on blood and soil, birth characteristics, or social class. We’ve expanded the notion of who’s a true human being, not merely an object or property,” to include everybody, he said. “Our notion that every person has value is as precious as gemstones. It comes from thousands of years of struggle. You can’t appreciate the preciousness of what we have now without understanding where it came from,” he added.

He said he has contacted local and state officials in his drive to amend the current high school graduation requirements, and plans to reach out to more. Though a self-professed political neophyte, he is willing to work with Idahoans of any political persuasion in his bid to improve Idaho’s educational system. “I have no idea where this will go, but I believe in it,” he said. “I want people to at least think about this.”