I heartily support Julie McDonald-Smith’s call to teach more civics, to understand what it means to be an American. We need wider understanding of the Founding Fathers’ intent when they edited out any relief for slaves from their drafts of the Constitution. We need to know more about how many white colonists arrived in chains. We need to know that the colony of Carolina was formed as a buffer to stop the feared spread of Catholicism from Spain. We need to understand the causes of the War of 1812 (our aggression re: the sweeping of Britain out of Canada) and we must understand the root arguments for the formation of public schools to begin with. Your columnist may fear we are falling apart and away from our core values (freedom for some), while not appreciating that the spread of knowledge and the piercing of hypocrisy is what is liberating us from the domination of the fabricators of a false history.

Will Watman
Portland


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