Few things delight me more than the agitation of others. I am happiest when those around me are mildly indignant. This may seem puerile, but it has purpose: A bit of a lather is good among those who hope to seriously engage each other and their ideas.
Perhaps it was in this same spirit that Nate Brand wrote his article for last week’s Collegian (“Saul Alinsky: required reading”). In it, Brand makes an argument for the incorporation of Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” into the American Heritage Reader. The mere fact that Alinsky’s thinking is antithetical to that of Hillsdale College is held up as one reason for his incorporation into the Reader.
He says: “The Reader already contains speeches from Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt, which are included to provide a contrary school of thought. It is time to arm students with some insight into modern progressivism and its tactics.”
There are two problems with this assertion. First, Wilson and Roosevelt are significant figures from American political history, regardless of their (or your) political persuasion. Yes, they provide insight into progressive thought. But they were not placed in the Reader with the express intent of giving students an object for their Two Minutes Hate — or, as Brand puts it, providing a “contrary school of thought.”
Related to this is my second contention: namely, that Brand misinterprets the goals that instructed the formation of the American Heritage Reader in the first place. The preface of the Reader itself states that the readings included “do not convey information merely, but they are the sources that historians interpret to make sense of our past.” It goes on to invite students to “examine these fragments of the American past as the primary means of understanding both the roots of American order and sources for contemporary disorders.”
American Heritage is intended to introduce first- and second-year students to the primary thinkers of American history, not to perform ideological conditioning. The purpose of studying history (particularly at the introductory level) is not to wield knowledge like the Hammer of Thor, leveling it upon the heads of unsuspecting and ill-informed political adversaries, but rather to understand the history of our nation — and ourselves — more completely.
Judgments and action can and must come later, when our means to determining judgment and guiding action have been more fully developed. An authentic confrontation with “contrary schools of thought” can occur only after we are acquainted with our own school of thought. Discourse cannot occur without prior consideration and careful development of our own beliefs.
Additionally, treating the study of history as a rhetorical tool impoverishes the thinkers and traditions from whence America came. To behave as if some of these men are merely “the opposition” is to bankrupt your liberal education.
Robert Penn Warren wrote that “the end of man is knowledge.” Truth is not something we can appropriate for our own purposes. It is our purpose. History does not stand to be seized for the sake of an advantageous narrative. It is our narrative. Our education must not be plundered for the sake of politics.
