Commentary

Americas historical amnesia hit a new low this month with aMonmouth University pollshowing that one out of three of those polled believe Barack Obama was a better president than George Washington.

The news was significantly more horrifying when considering the evaluations of self-identified Democrats who consider Obama to be a better president than Washington by a whopping 63 percent to 29 percent.

Republicans showed more historical sanity by ranking the Father of our Country above both Obama and President Donald Trump, but not by enough to justify much solace.

Just a few decades ago, it was controversial that Abraham Lincoln and, in some polls even Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had surpassed Washington as the best president as ranked by elite historians. Those results, mostly from surveys of liberal-leaning academics, were troubling enough. The results of the Monmouth poll, however, are significantly more so.

That a case for Washington has to be made at all speaks volumes about the state of our civic education in the United States today. But, lets make the case for Washingtons greatness in just a few sentences.

First, he was known as the Father of his Country for the very good reason that he was our foundings Indispensable Man. The United States itself is inconceivable without Washington as our first Commander-in-Chief and our first president.

Second, there would be no presidency at all without him, the office being created around the assumption that he would be its first occupant and would fill in the blanks of the Constitution.

Now also consider that Washington was asked to ascend to an office unlike anything that ever existed. In an age of monarchy, the Constitutional Convention had created a republican executive. The vague language of the Constitutions Article II and the lack of historical examples put Washington into a situation where he, quite literally, had to invent the office as he enacted it.

What does it mean to be Commander-in-Chief? What does it mean to faithfully execute the laws? What does it mean to work with the Senate to write and ratify treaties? No president ever faced such a daunting situation because they all inherited an office Washington himself created. They had his precedence to rely on as they faced the challenges of their own age.

Putting the challenges faced by Lincoln during the Civil War and FDR during the Great Depression aside for another day, theres simply no comparison at all between the challenges faced by our first president and those of his 44thand 45thsuccessors. The fact that the question was even dreamed up to be asked is, frankly, shocking in itself.

Through most of U.S. history, our fellow citizens would have been steeped in history enough to know that no contemporary president could surpass a man commonly recognized as one of the greatest men of modern times.

First, schools that once took citizen education as one of their core missions have largely abandoned the teaching of basic American history and civics under the pressure of relevance to the contemporary culture and the economy along with the worship of the subjects immortalized as STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math).

Second, many of our teachers today are trained in schools of education focusing on pedagogy and research and often dont have substantive degrees in history or a related discipline. Because civics and history are not as valued as they once were, even professional development opportunities for teachers in the field have been replaced by workshops on pedagogy, bullying, and literacy.

Third, slavery, the unforgivable sin of early America, now trumps every other consideration. Washington, no matter his virtues and centrality in the creation of the American political order, was a slaveholder and for that he cannot be forgiven in todays academy.

Washingtons reputation not only suffers from being a slaveholder but, more basically, from being yet another old white male. Political Correctness, by its very design, is an acid that spares no greatness that does not measure up to the latest value or fashion.

Fourth, the United States suffers from what C.S. Lewis diagnosed as chronological snobbery. Everything thats closer to us in time is, by the logic of evolution, progress, and technological advancement, better and more sophisticated than anything that came before.

The Monmouth University poll should worry all Americans and call us to action. If we care about the quality of our electorate and their historical knowledge, we should insist our schools value and reward the teaching of basic American history and civics. We should reform teacher education programs so that teachers in every state get degrees that focus on subject specialties more than pedagogical theories.

And we should support those organizations outside schools and the academy who focus on inspiring and educating teachers in professional development about American history and civics. Some of us have been toiling in these fields for decades but need more help from the public and buy-in from our school administrators.

If our students, and the general public, dont know American history and the foundations of our constitutional order enough to know that George Washingtons greatness is in a different category entirely than any recent politician, how can they be expected not to fall for the latest demagogue, political huckster, or fad?

Gary L. Gregg is the host of the podcastVital Remnantsand is author of a number of books on Americas founding principles.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

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Obama Better Than George Washington? Americas Crisis in Civic Education - The Epoch Times