Censoring the word "America" from our own schools is something Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler and Osama bin Laden would never have thought possible. Michigan has done it without a whimper.
In perhaps a well-intentioned, but pernicious example of political correctness, the Michigan Department of Education is attempting to ban the "America" and "American" from our public schools. Even though the word "America" appears in the department's own civics and government benchmarks, the department's style protocol for the Michigan Education Assessment Program requires that "America" and "Americans" be expunged from our testing and grade level expectations. Last week, the department ordered that our hard-working teachers not utter the words.
The Department of Education asserts that "Americans" includes Mexicans, Canadians and others in the Western Hemisphere, so referring to U.S. residents as Americans is inappropriate. In the department's view, "America" happens to include South, Central and North America. Accordingly, when referring to the colonial period, the state bureaucracy requires teachers to refer to "the colonies of North America" or "North Americans." After the American Revolution, the nation is called the United States (not of America).
The state's edict would be laughable if it were not so disgraceful. Instead of focusing on better teaching methods and educational resources to help our hard-working teachers and parents, the Department of Education spends its energy on confusing, misleading, historically inaccurate and counterproductive wordplay.
What is it with this drive on the left to eviscerate what it means to be an American? What is so wrong about being proud of one's home country? Americans are proud of being American because our country is the world-leader in freedom and democracy. It wasn't Mexico that brought the world a form of government that ruled at "the will of the people." It wasn't Canada that established the first ever Bill of Rights, and I don't think either country can claim such feats as landing men on the moon or being the birth place of technological innovations from the automobile to the internet.
Nothing against the citizens of those countries personally, but they haven't done what we've done.
Nobody does what America does in the world. We provide more aid money to the international community than any other country on the face of the earth. We have used our military to fight against tyranny all over the globe, liberating millions upon millions in the process. And while our foreign policy hasn't always been perfect, one has to believe that a tally of "good deeds vs. bad deeds" would have this country head and shoulders above any other.
There is nothing wrong in taking pride in that. Taking pride in being an American doesn't mean we're saying that we're better than anyone else; it is a simple recognition of what we have accomplished within our borders and in the world.
We should be teaching our kids that it is ok to be proud of their citizenship. There are some very specific reasons why America is so prosperous, but if we teach our kids that there is nothing special about being American we are going to lose site of those things...to the detriment of our society as a whole.