My cousin was born on the Fourth of July. He wasn’t Tom Cruise in a wheelchair, just an ordinary English boy to whom, other than the annual anniversary of his own existence, the occasion meant absolutely nothing whatsoever. Sometimes, when he was very small, his parents would highlight footage of Fourth of July celebrations taking place thousands of miles away across the Atlantic whenever they appeared in Hollywood movies, and lie that such pretty fireworks were all being staged for his own personal birthday benefit. He believed them.
My cousin was not, and is not, a retard. He helps build and design airplane components for a living, so you’d better hope not, anyway. It is just that, in other countries across the globe, knowledge of many domestic commonplaces of U.S. history are not the universally known cultural and civilizational lodestones U.S. natives may have been raised to expect they might be.
Benedict Arnold, Stonewall Jackson, George Washington and the cherry tree, Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman: all events and figures basically unknown to the average non-American abroad. When, as a child myself, I heard someone on TV describe President Ronald Reagan as “signing his John Hancock” on some treaty or other, I wondered why he was doing it with his privates. Surely not because he couldn’t afford a pen. Was it just to show contempt for the Russians?
Even though London was America’s old colonial overlord, many ordinary descendants of Redcoats over here don’t know the slightest thing about American history, or even its modern politics; 90 percent of Brits probably think the House of Congress is a Washington brothel. (In the Clinton years, they may have been right.) And what was the Gettysburg Address, when it was at home? Abraham Lincoln’s P.O. Box number?
The whole current “America 250” thing is therefore something of a mystery to many of us over here, especially when we turn on the news and see it being celebrated by a big homoerotic wrestling match on the White House lawn. Two hundred and fifty years since what? many would ask in complete, unfeigned ignorance. Since the initial founding of the WWE wrestling league? With his stovepipe hat, Lincoln did look a bit like an Undertaker.
Surveys continually ridiculing Americans for their lack of knowledge about other countries’ geography or history are common, but the same pattern works the other way around too. Ironically, one of the main stereotypes about Americans in European nations is that they are educationally ill-informed. Maybe Europeans should try looking in the mirror sometime.
The main problem here in the UK would appear to be that American history (with one key thematic exception, which we’ll come to later) just isn’t taught in modern-day British schools. But then again, quite a lot just isn’t taught in modern-day British schools. I should know, because during a former career I used to be responsible for not teaching it.
The levels of general ignorance amongst certain students were quite shocking. I don’t just mean never having heard of Thoreau, Whitman, Emerson, or the New England Transcendentalist movement; literary lacunae like that are understandable. I mean genuine gaps in simple common knowledge like (and these are all real examples from my own time in the classroom) not knowing what an octopus or a pickaxe or a helicopter are. One child refused to believe dinosaurs ever existed “because I’ve never seen one.” Me neither, to be fair.
Another girl truly did not know London was the capital of England. Mind you, looking at the state of its inhabitants 20 years later, I can see why she might have been confused. One teenager was even more confused by an end-of-term reward screening of Ghostbusters, asking how the filmmakers had managed to train all the ghosts to act on cue for them on camera like that. I still cherish the semi-informed adolescent female who thought Tolstoy had written a novel called Anna Kournikova: “Game, Set, and Match, Count Vronsky.” In terms of Americana, she no doubt thought Alexander Hamilton et al. had written The Federer Papers.
When it came to their formative “knowledge” of American history, most English children (including myself) absorbed it mainly from watching imported cartoons, primarily The Simpsons; so, a substantial proportion of Brits probably now consider the U.S. historically a yellow country, not a white one. Likewise, thanks to the recent “racially blind” musical of his life, I truly think the majority of UK citizens believe the highly obscure (to us) Alexander Hamilton was black or Hispanic. Cowboys and Indians always puzzled us as kids, too. The Indians we knew never tried firing any arrows at us; they just got on quietly with running their corner shops.
Around a quarter of students I taught honestly didn’t realize Britain had once “owned” America in the first place. Teaching them English Language at A-Level (the leading UK exam qualification for 17- to 18-year-olds), when it came to bringing in Noah Webster, it soon transpired that a small minority didn’t realize Americans spoke English at all, never mind why. “They don’t! They speak American!” I was told, not as an adolescent satire of how you all call “football” “soccer,” or “pavements” “sidewalks,” or “crisps” “potato chips,” but as a genuine “factual” opinion.
“America and Britain are two nations divided by a common language,” George Bernard Shaw once supposedly said, and it turns out he was correct. But did he speak these words in English or American?
One year, in order to “celebrate multiculturalism”, our school staged a “Global Citizen Week”, where I was assigned responsibility for designing and delivering a quiz about the Americas. Ordered to include a few (theoretically) impossible-to-get-wrong answers so as to avoid any particularly dim infant suffering the indignity of getting a final score of zero, one of the joke queries I posed was “On what date do Americans celebrate the Fourth of July?” Some of them didn’t know. And if they didn’t know when the Fourth of July was, the chances of them knowing what it was were even slimmer.
It all sounds very amusing, but such chronic unawareness had its darker side too, as it meant the children were far easier to manipulate in terms of forming their naïve view of the USA.
Lack of knowledge represents an intellectual vacuum into which the leftists who design UK school curriculums these days can pour their anti-Western poison all the more easily. The one area of American history which does appear all over the curriculum in British schools in the 21st century is slavery and the civil rights movement. As a result, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Teddy Roosevelt are largely a mystery to British kids; Emmett Till, Martin Luther King, and Rosa Parks are not. The whole point is to (mis-)represent America—and, by extension, the entire Western world from whose historic white European inheritance it grew—as irredeemably and inarguably wicked and racist, and therefore to deserve tearing down like a statue of an old Confederate general.
During my own ’80s and ’90s schooldays, this was not really the case. When, happily unindoctrinated by schoolyard Race-Marxism, I first saw Spike Lee’s Malcolm X in my teens and it got to the scene where he was shot, I thought the fool deserved it. By the time I reentered the classroom as an English teacher myself in the mid-2000s, after left-wing Blair-era educational “reforms” had enjoyed enough time to work their malign effect, I was bemused to find myself endlessly teaching To Kill a Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men. I wanted to read H.G. Wells’s Invisible Man with the kids, not Ralph Ellison’s; in the end, it was one of the reasons I finally quit.
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If you ever wondered why Black Lives Matter caught on so easily across the pond in England, where we never even had any domestic black slavery or official racial segregation to protest about, this might help explain it.
So, when they hear the phrase “America 250,” a substantial number of Brits have by now been conditioned by decades’ worth of media, education and political brainwashing to think it automatically means not 250 years of World Wrestling Entertainment, but 250 years of a different WWE entirely: White Western Evil. Without really stopping to do the math(s), some who are particularly well up on their imported New York Times reeducation programs may even reflexively think the year being referred to by that significant semiquincentennial number is 1619, not 1776.
Still, there is some consolation for disappointed transatlantic history teachers. Whilst non-American schoolkids these days might not know what the Fourth of July is, you can be damn sure they all know what Juneteenth is.
