Joey Ramone, redneck humor and Liberty Valance

There tend to be two ways of thinking about history: Either it was your favorite subject in school, or you couldn't stand it and the memorization of names, dates and places.

In either case, I hypothesize that history � regardless of which end of the spectrum it falls on for you � is America's worst subject.

I recently was told a story about a workplace quiz competition centered on U.S. history. The person telling this story wholly admits to not knowing enough about history in general, U.S. history in specific.

And guess who ran away with the competition? Apparently, the other contestants were taken aback by anyone who might have a snowball's chance against the youngsters on the Jeff Foxworthy-hosted "Are You Smarter Than A Fifth-Grader?"

Show me one fifth-grader that, when asked about the cause of the American Civil War, can say anything beyond "slavery" and "states' rights," and I will show you a set of parents and teachers who are getting it right.

But I digress.

As someone who divided his time equally between history classes in college and the campus paper's newsroom, I like to think I've got a decent grasp on where this country has been and what it's seen for a person of my age.

But I must acknowledge that my education in history was flawed long before I first stepped on university ground.

There was the teacher who thought "blitzkrieg" was a German tactic � and an American word. This qualifies as a half-truth.

She might have been more familiar with another usage of the word:



By no coincidence, this was the same teacher who relied heavily on an ABC News-produced video series to make sure we had our historical bases covered without us thinking bad of her for forcing us to (*GASP*) listen to lectures, read books and take copious notes.

But in defense of Mrs. Duck (names have been changed to protect the innocent, just like Jack Webb), she introduced me to the work of John Ford, easily the greatest director in the history of cinema.

If anything should be required viewing to middle- and high-school students, it's "The Grapes of Wrath" and its mournful refrain of "Red River Valley."

But as much as Joey Ramone, John Ford and the rest of the canon of entertainers dabbled with thoughts and phrases regarding the American experience, it only does so much.

"The Grapes of Wrath" is a great movie, but it's not a documentary. It's based on a novel. Actor and comedian Robert Wuhl recently proclaimed his own hypothesis of history being "based on a true story." This may be the case here.

For that matter, Mel Gibson's biggest box-office hit was not, in fact, an honest-to-God presentation of the Greatest Story Ever Told. But that won't stop legions of the faithful from thinking "The Passion" to be pretty close to how it all happened, if it did at all.

But it was a good movie, right?

Thank goodness "Pearl Harbor" was roundly dismissed as a bad movie, lest we be lead to believe good ole Jimmy Doolittle looked or sounded the least bit like Alec Baldwin.

But accepting the history in movies when we shouldn't (or at least buying into its authenticity more than we should) is mostly our own individual faults.

How any student gets out of high school only knowing Julius Caesar from a week of Shakespeare in theater class is quite troubling to me, if only for the fact that this actually happens today in the U.S. public school system.

But don't get me wrong. I have nothing against public schools or the hard-working people who keep them up and running. My mother, a public school teacher for the vast majority of her adult life, is one of those people who endures the administrative headaches and daily crises to make sure that her students are not just being shuffled along, grade to grade, year to year, to make sure enough kids graduate each year that they can stay in a community's good graces despite struggling with the mandates of No Child Left Behind and AYP.

I merely think it's important for everyone to play a strong role in developing a young person's desire to learn, and history is the best place to start. Even if little Billy ends up thinking a young Tom Hanks went up to the Zoltar machine, grew into a man overnight, worked on Death Row during the Great Depression before going off to find Matt Damon in France during the Second World War, there's a decent chance of Billy heading to the library for a copy of Tom H. Watkins' "The Hungry Years" or a biography of Dwight D. Eisenhower.

"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." � Maxwell Scott in "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance"