A ‘Founding Principles Act’ will distort American history

The Founding Fathers are everywhere these days.

The invocation of their names is used to justify every new law, every ideology — liberal and conservative.

This habit represents an unhealthy use of our nation’s history, and one that, unfortunately, is intensified by a new North Carolina law.

“The Founding Principles Act,” a law passed by the Republican legislature and signed by Gov. Bev Perdue, requires the statewide implementation of a new high school course called “American History I — The Founding Principles.”

Studying the founding documents — including the Constitution and the Federalist Papers — was already required by state law. But the new law makes what was one class — U.S. history — into two, the first of which will be solely devoted to these “founding principles.”

The error here lies not in the stated intention, which is to better inform a public that ranks poorly in knowledge of the philosophy of America’s founding.

Rather, the devil is in the details. The law gives local school boards the authority to determine the course’s curriculum. And this move coincides with the legislature’s decision to cut off funding for state-administered social studies exams.

These recent events amount to an extreme and harmful localization of history teaching in our public schools.

It’s often said that history is written by the winners. “The Founding Principles Act” lowers even that dismal threshold by allowing history to be written by any teacher or member of a county school board.

The idea of teaching national history with major regional variations is ill-advised for a few reasons.

First, there is a strong temptation to alter faraway history — especially something as abstract as the “founding principles” — to suit regional biases. For a state that carried the load for the Confederacy in the Civil War, the temptation could be strong to overemphasize the idea of limited government at the expense of other important concepts.

Second, advances in communication technology have made regional control of historical curriculum obsolete. Rural youth with no link to other countries or even other states might not have been disadvantaged by a limited perspective previously, but in a globalized world, these people are now virtually nonexistent.

As we celebrate our country’s 235th birthday, it is important to acknowledge that teaching its founding philosophy is, of course, an important part of being an educated citizen.

But special and regional focus on assorted ideologies will only encourage their misuse and will make it easier for North Carolina’s youth to pervert the truth for argument’s sake.

For a topic as important as our nation’s founding, differing versions of history cannot suffice.