The teaching of history is inconvenient for government control freaks.
Troublemakers are always pointing out, for example, that America's soul was formed by its history, the most crucial segments of which involved struggles against the tyranny of control freaks.
Before the American Revolution began, a tyrant named King George III issued a new onslaught of "writs of assistance." They allowed unwarranted blanket searches for contraband, which in turn let law enforcement authorities (called "customs racketeers" by colonists) confiscate property and divert it to their own use.
That resulted in protests climaxing with what today's history students (some, anyway) know as the Boston Massacre.
The idea of letting law enforcers augment their salaries with confiscations has crept back into parts of America in recent decades, and Pennsylvania prosecutors are pushing hard to further subvert the Bill of Rights ban on blanket searches.
Years after the Boston Massacre, John Adams, who actually defended the British soldiers involved in that incident, called the dispute over the writs "the spark in which originated the American Revolution."
The actual Revolution began at Lexington and Concord, the inconvenient facts about which have been diluted in public schools. That's because the American Revolution, and the nation, began on the touchy issue of gun control. (George III wanted only government authorities to be allowed the means to defend themselves.)
The focus on history was intensified in recent days by two developments.
First, Leslie Lukow, a student at Allentown's Dieruff High School, raised a stink by criticizing her school while serving as the school's nonvoting representative to the Allentown School Board.
On Friday, I sided with school officials who tried to admonish Lukow. I said their action was not "censorship" but the proper application of accountability. It would be censorship if Lukow spoke strictly as a private citizen. As for bashing her school, I said "she made some splendid points," particularly her observation that some fellow students were not being taught history and thus believed that the American Revolution was over slavery.
Almost on cue, The Morning Call had a story on Saturday about a plan by the Allentown School District to gut social studies education. "Sixth-grade curriculum that covers world and ancient history would be integrated into English language arts class," the story said. (Marvelous. A system that cannot seem to teach English will have English teachers teach a subject in which they're even less competent.)
It also was reported Saturday that the Pennsylvania District Attorneys Association wants to expand unwarranted blanket searches in the form of electronic eavesdropping. "To do nothing is not an option," said Montgomery County DA Risa Ferman.
Yes, that's exactly how George III felt; authorities must be allowed ever-increasing power to intrude and to dominate our lives.
Our spirits got a boost Sunday in a story about the "History Expo" at the Lehigh Valley Heritage Museum on Saturday.
I regret to say I missed the expo because of other commitments, but that story had another quotation I found fascinating. "History is important so that we remember the sacrifices people made and see how things have improved over time," said Joseph Garrera, the museum's director.
Some things improve. Appreciation of how the nation began and then progressed, Garrera agreed, may not be among them.
I am not a historian, but I often gripe about the devaluation and distortion of history in this country's schools. Part of the museum's expo, for instance, focused on the Civil War, but that was not North America's first war fought over the issue of slavery.
The glorification of what happened at the Alamo and in the so-called "Texas Revolution" is a gigantic lie. Davey Crockett and other slave traders and owners from the South sought to reintroduce slavery into Mexico by force, a criminal enterprise that eventually succeeded. (Emancipation had come to Mexico years earlier.)
And so it goes. The enemies of genuine American values are desperate to sabotage the teaching of history — the good and the bad — because it gets in the way of the goals of latter-day George III control freaks.
"That's the reason history is so valuable," Garrera told me. "If you have no perspective, if you don't know your history … that's the reason we're so easily fooled. …
"I think, ultimately, it will be our unraveling," he added. "How can we expect people to fight for our country when they don't understand what it's all about."
Paul Carpenter's commentary appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays.