This week, the world commemorated the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz - the infamous Nazi death camp where over a million people - including 960,000 Jews - perished.
A recent study revealed that two out of three American millennials don’t know what Auschwitz was.
Why is it so important that we know our history?
Because when we know the great evils committed in the past, we join together in saying “Never again.”
As one Holocaust survivor said at a ceremony held at Auschwitz earlier this week:
“I feel uplifted when I see so many of you here who will carry the memory of innocent people from all nations of the world who met their death here. You will make sure that those horrors are never repeated.”
This is why it is essential that we make sure our children and young people learn history - and this is why I’m opposing a bill in the Statehouse that would de-prioritize history in the classroom.
This bill - H.4760 - strikes a requirement in state law that high school students pass a U.S. history course in order to graduate, while leaving in science.
In other words, in Speaker Jay Lucas’ ideal classroom, you can flunk history, but not science.
I am told that House Education Committee Chair Rita Allison is working on an amendment to “clarify” that de-prioritizing history is not the “intent.” However, statements of legislative intent are non-binding. What is binding is that passing history will no longer be a graduation requirement!
No “clarifying amendment” will change that. The only real “fix” is to keep the high school history course and test as a requirement for graduation in the law.
This systematic de-prioritization of history is unfortunately just the latest in a long trend of leftist attacks on history.
We saw this when they removed the Confederate Battle Flag from the Confederate Monument on the Statehouse grounds, and we’ve seen it continue in the ongoing push to tear down Confederate monuments and replace our history with a sanitized, politically correct version to appease today’s “woke” leftists.
If we forget the mistakes of yesterday, if we fail to learn from past tragedies, we are setting ourselves up to repeat them.
The establishment spinmasters are accusing me of lying, and saying they "aren't removing history" while doing that very thing.
Make no mistake: If you don't have to pass a history course to graduate, and you don't have an exam for it, how much time and effort will we really put into making sure kids know their history? It will be crowded out to make room for other subjects... like science.
What is Speaker Jay Lucas’ real agenda behind all of this?
Speaker Lucas and his establishment cronies are trying to turn our education system into a well-oiled machine to chug out workers for the big corporations they lure to the state with your tax dollars.
De-prioritizing history while keeping an emphasis on science is right in line with their economic development agenda for education.
The survey I mentioned earlier contained two additional statistics that I found very sobering: Seven out of ten Americans believe that people don’t care about the Holocaust as much as they used to, and over half of Americans believe that something like the Holocaust can happen again.
To that I say, not on my watch!
Let us never forget. Let us never repeat the tragedies of history. And let us always, always remember both the lessons and the triumphs that make up America’s story.