The Outstater
The Unmet Demand for a Well-Rounded Education
WE STRESS the importance of teaching history in our newly published Indiana Mandate. The Founders believed the country would remain free only if its people learned history’s lessons. Benjamin Franklin noted that history would show the young “the advantages of liberty, mischiefs of licentiousness, benefits arising from good laws and a due execution of justice, etc.”
Until recently, higher education took this responsibility seriously. Not anymore. Surveying over 1,000 liberal arts colleges, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) found that only 18 percent require an American history course for graduation. The number likely has dropped further.
In a more recent report, “No U.S. History? How College History Departments Leave the United States out of the Major,” the ACTA found that 18 of the top 25 public universities did not have an American history survey requirement even for students seeking a B.A. in history.
Neither of Indiana’s flagship universities requires a course in U.S. History. According to Indiana University at Bloomington, “U.S. History is not strictly required for a bachelor’s degree. There is a GenEd social and historical studies requirement, but that can be fulfilled with a variety of courses.” Purdue states, “Our core curriculum has a human cultures/humanities requirement and U.S. history is an option.” (Purdue does have a civic literacy requirement though it is not an academic course).
More broadly, just last week Yale University issued a report on declining trust in higher education. “A decade ago, 57 percent of Americans expressed ‘a great deal’ or ‘quite a lot’ of confidence in higher education,” it notes. “By 2024, that number had dropped to a historic low of 36 percent. While trust improved slightly in 2025, 70 percent of Americans say that higher education is heading in the wrong direction.”
Our foundation proposes mandating a course in U.S. history as an undergraduate requirement for Indiana public universities. Georgia has set the example. Legislation there says that no undergraduate student in any college or university in the state can receive a certificate of graduation or a degree without successfully completing course work on the history of the United States and the history of the state and on the provisions and principles of the U.S. Constitution and those of the state constitution.
That said, beyond the founding documents, we are not fans of government prescribing what exactly to teach. We would prefer that parents, donors, patrons and supervisory boards make those decisions — and be responsible for any adverse consequences, specifically graduates too unknowing or too indoctrinated to function in the real world.
But again, for the good of society, to encourage critical thinking, to avoid a fatal divisiveness, an effort should be made to offer every student a balanced view of history and economics — a complete, well-rounded one. And yes, I have suggestions:
§ Young minds are drawn to the promises of socialism and egalitarian philosophies. They should learn about them in all respects, including their discouraging economic record. That record began 200 years ago in New Harmony, Indiana, with the failure of the first socialist experiment, Robert Owen’s “New Moral Order.” Essential to understanding that failure will be the work of Adam Smith and more recently that of the Austrian School of Economics, both of which show how capitalism harnesses self-interest through private property, profit and loss. It turns out that it is not merely a matter of socialists needing to try harder, socialism has systemic flaws. Without personal gain tied to results, productivity falls and innovation slows. Sorry examples are plentiful, including the former Soviet Union’s chronic shortages despite vast resources. Befriending nations that eschew such envy-driven policies, and opposing those nations that adopt them, which would include Islamists and others of authoritarian stripe, will serve as a workable foreign policy — a “we win, they lose” strategy, in Ronald Reagan’s famous words.
§ It is a fine thing to teach the tragedy of the “Trail of Tears,” the decade-long forced displacement of tens of thousands of Native Americans who had earlier rejected voluntary alternatives of compensation and assimilation. (The displacement, interestingly, included the black slaves owned by the tribes.) But students also will want to know about the earlier St. Clair’s Defeat, in which a thousand U.S. soldiers, plus their encamped wives and children, were massacred and tortured on the banks of the Wabash River. A few years later, Gen. Anthony Wayne, for which Fort Wayne is named, utterly defeated and dispersed the same tribes using Roman Legion tactics while killing only 25 enemy combatants. The victory, a frequent topic in our office, opened the West to settlement and the cultivation of an entire continent in only two generations, an achievement said to have been unmatched in world history.
§ We will want to teach about all aspects of the life of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, organized under the premise that men should be judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin. A contrary view, however, one that commands preferences on the basis of ethnicity, assumes a “blank slate” theory that all peoples are inherently the same and have been so for 100,000 years. Any disparity, proponents argue, must therefore be caused by racism and must be forcefully corrected — equality of results over equality of opportunity. The science cited by the blank-slate theorists may or may not hold up, but students will want to hear a counter argument based on new DNA evidence. It is put forward most prominently by a Harvard geneticist, David Reich, and rejects the dogma of human sameness. It warns that genetics is discovering evidence of dramatic and differing evolutionary trends in human groups within only the last 10,000 years, beginning with the Neolithic Revolution and the start of agriculture. Could it be, then, that we are “created equal” as Dr. King and the Declaration of Independence rightly state but with different abilities and natures matching ancestral pathways?
§ Students should be aware of the challenges faced by the estimated 12,000 impoverished Haitians dropped into Indiana by the Biden administration, most of them in the Evansville area. Students also should know that those difficulties are of Haiti’s own making. Following the Haitian Revolution, the country’s first leader, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, ordered the execution of the country’s entire white population and the dismantling of the European infrastructure. Dessalines justified the killings as an act of “national authority.” Subsequent generations of Haitian leadership have proven incapable of governing a modern economy and the country has been in severe poverty ever since — not a population model on which to build U.S. immigration policy.
§ If there is any student graduating without a thorough understanding of chattel slavery as practiced in parts of the American South, that should be corrected. They also should read the work of a black economist, Thomas Sowell, on how slavery existed across nearly all human societies for thousands of years — among Africans themselves, Europeans, Asians, Arabs and others. It was not invented or uniquely practiced by white Americans or Westerners. In fact, more whites were enslaved in North Africa by Barbary pirates than Africans in the U.S., and they were being enslaved long after American blacks were freed. Western Civilization was the first to abolish slavery globally, at great cost, partly borne by 25,000 Hoosier soldiers who died in the U.S. Civil War. If this history is fully understood, a call for reparations would be seen as absurdity, not social justice.
§ Finally, students will want to study Charles Darwin’s ideas on evolution, ideas that changed how mankind views itself. They will need reminded, however, that as with the blank-slate viewpoint discussed above it is just a theory and is being critically tested by modern scientific methods. Indeed, there is an argument that small variations and Intergenerational differences do not accumulate to transform one species into another. And sure enough, the fossil record after 167 years of archeological exploration does not show the gradual transitions and unbroken chains that Darwin expected would be found. Rather, high-tech microscopy is seeing examples of irreducible features at the cellular level. These are composed of interacting parts where removing any single one causes the entire system to fail. That would mean that they were unlikely to have “evolved” but were more likely — brace yourself — to have been “designed.” — tcl
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