HISTORY OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION: Needed high school graduation requirement

Right now, Rep. Joe Alfieri and Sen. Ben Toews are bringing an initiative before the education committees of Idaho’s legislature that would add passing a year of the history of Western Civilization to our state’s high school graduation requirements. This is long overdue.

State bureaucrats have evidently not seen a pressing need for this measure. Many must assume that since our mainstream American culture is Western, there need be no particular emphasis on teaching Western Civilization in our schools. They assume that cultural osmosis will be sufficient to teach Idaho’s students what they need to know about our shared heritage.

That blithe assumption is analogous to the notion that teenagers need not take Driver’s Ed. because they have been passengers in automobiles since infancy. Obviously, our roads would be far more dangerous without a systematic instruction in the technical and legal aspects of operating a motor vehicle.

Many Leftists reflexively oppose this proposal because they have utterly committed themselves to stoking the dissatisfactions that constitute identity politics. Too much political advantage would have to be sacrificed for any Progressive to admit that what defines us is what we all share in common rather than what divides us.

Ghettoization is the inevitable consequence of sundering people based on race, ethnicity, faith, ideology or sexuality. Their obsession with never-ending grievance based on group identity can only end America in a Balkanized tribalism.

American freedom cannot be understood independent of the Western tradition. Every Idaho student deserves to be acculturated into it.

RALPH K. GINORIO

Coeur d’Alene