Why do we even care about patriotism in school? Even if loving our country is a good thing, what does it have to do with teaching and learning? You don’t need a formal education to love your country, right?
True enough. But as we discovered on Tuesday, loving your country for the right reasons matters a great deal. It starts with loving our country because it is ours. But patriotism cannot stop there. For if we don’t know the good and great things about our nation, then in our ignorance, we’ll be prone to love her for far less noble achievements. And in the end, that will begin to make our country far less noble in fact.
Our friend G.K. Chesterton saw it happen in England in his time, and what he said then is true of us today:
“We fall back upon gross and frivolous things for our patriotism, for a simple reason. We are the only people in the world who are not taught in childhood our own literature and our own history.
We are, as a nation, in the truly extraordinary condition of not knowing our own merits.”
Because of their ignorance, people in Britain were patriotic more because of her success in trade, the power of her military, and her colonial triumphs than for her great contributions to the world in history and literature. And it was making Britain less noble.
We teach you about Washington’s courage and leadership, Jefferson’s brilliance and Lincoln’s moral fortitude; about the genius of the Constitution, the heroism of the Normandy invasion, and America’s defeat of Soviet communism; we have you read books like Huck Finn and Moby Dick and poems by Whitman and Dickinson and Frost; and expose you to the art of Cassatt and the music of Copland…because these are among the great and noble achievements of America—good reasons for us to love her—and if we don’t teach them to you, then we’ll be like Britain was, where
“[A]ll this vast heritage of intellectual glory is kept from our schoolboys like a heresy; and they are left to live and die in the dull and infantile type of patriotism which they learnt from a box of tin soldiers.”
Education is necessary for the right kind of patriotism, because we cannot love what we do not know.
Have a wonderful day.