Here is the full Rule 39:

At the University of Washington recently, the student senate voted down a proposal to honor Gregory "Pappy" Boyington, a 1933 graduate of the university who was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his service commanding the famed "Black Sheep" squadron during WWII. One student objected that the decorated Marine was not "an example of the sort of person UW wants to produce." Another student sniped, "We don't need to honor any more rich white males."

But, as the Wall Street Journal later pointed out, Boyington was “neither white nor especially rich.” He was, in fact, an American Indian who raised his three children as a single parent.[i]

What you had on display here was several young people who had passed through an expensive public education system if not utterly unaware of American history, at least without any sense of the sacrifices others had made so that pampered college students would be free to say foolish things at student senate meetings.

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Don’t smirk.

In 2001, according to the National Assessment of Education Progress, nearly six in ten high school seniors scored below “basic” in American history, meaning they were pretty much clueless about anything that happened before 1986.[ii] Nearly a third of seniors lacked even a basic grasp of civics.

''More young Americans could name the Three Stooges than the three branches of government,” quipped David Eisenhower, the grandson of the president (Dwight Eisenhower, in case you were wondering.) [iii]

He wasn’t joking.  A recent survey found that 22 percent of Americans could name all five members of the Simpson cartoon family while only one person in 1,000 surveyed could name all five freedoms guaranteed in the First Amendment.[iv] (The five Simpsons are Bart, Lisa, Homer, Marge, and Maggie. The five freedoms are freedom of speech, religion, press, and assembly, and the right to petition for redress of grievances.)

The ignorance runs deep. When high school seniors were asked to pick a U.S. ally in World War II from a list of countries more than half chose Italy, Germany or Japan, which just happen to be the countries we were fighting against. There’s a relatively simple explanation for why students don’t know this: nobody bothered to teach them.

The typical product of public education has only the vaguest notion of the country’s past, except perhaps a fuzzy idea that our freedoms were won by a collection of worthies that included English teachers with ACLU cards, the International Garment Workers Union, the suffragettes, and Florence Kelley, the founder of the National Consumer’s League. They are also given a smattering of interesting knowledge about the production of maize legislation passed in the 19^th Century by guys who looked like they wore dead squirrels on their faces.

But the real problem is that being layered with political correctness, most history textbooks are dull, flat, and eye-glazingly dull even by the standards of modern educationist dreck.

In , “The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn,” Diane Ravitch describes the bloodless, inoffensive pap that fills the modern textbook:

“Stories that have no geographical location...  Stories in which all conflicts are insignificant.  Stories in which men are fearful   and women are brave.  Stories in which older people are never ill.  Stories in which children are obedient, never disrespectful, never get into dangerous situations, never confront problems that cannot be easily solved.  Stories in which blind people and people with physical disabilities need no assistance from anyone because their handicaps are not handicaps…. Stories about the past in which historical accuracy is ignored… Stories in which everyone is happy almost all the time.”[v]

In other words, stories with all the blood, drama, personality, and interest drained out of them. Educrats try rationalizing all of this by arguing that it’s not important to learn “mere” facts about history; that it is more important to learn to “think historically.” But how do you think about history without knowing what happened?

Fortunately, there is an antidote to this diet of intellectual tofu. I was lucky enough to be in Gettysburg for the 140^th anniversary of the battle and to walk the ground where Robert E. Lee, supremely confident, watched his desperate gamble fail, where a handful of exhausted men made a desperate charge to save Little Round Top and the Union flank, and General Pickett lead his tragic last charge.

And I wondered: how in God’s name did they ever make this boring? How did our schools decide this wasn’t worth teaching, and that if it was worth teaching, it should be taught badly, carefully gutted of anything that might capture the imagination of children?

So while educationists were wringing their hands about their failure to interest students in history, my wife, my son Alex and I were standing at the “Angle” on Cemetery Ridge, where the Confederacy reached its high water mark and was broken. “This is so cool,” Alex said. “I want to know everything about the battle.”   You’d never convince him that history is boring. But schools have been doing a damn good job of convincing students of exactly that.