Introducing: Heather Cox Richardson, putting the past and present together in context

When I was in high school, history was my least favorite subject. Remembering all those names and dates is not my forte. I once answered a fill in the blank question about who did this thing with, “I can’t remember his name but he worked with so and so and they also did x, y and z.” I’m not going to lie, I got partial credit because I obviously knew the who and the what and the why, I just couldn’t remember the name. Side note, if we meet and I see you again in person and can’t remember your name, please don’t take it personally. I almost never call my daughters by the right name, and I love them a lot. But back to history.

Sometime in the last few years, I’ve become keenly aware of how much our not knowing history is really affecting us. I remember learning about the importance of unions and how the things we enjoy today – like a 40 hour work week and child labor protections – came in part because of labor unions. And how Jim Crow laws prevented people from voting and buying houses. Or how women couldn’t even get a credit card in their own name until a couple years after I was born. And it turns out, knowing history IS important. As they say, if we don’t learn from our past, we’re doomed to repeat it. And here we are now in 2024. I have taken my girls with me to every election and told them how women didn’t always have the right to vote and many fought and died for that right and we were not going to waste their fight or deny our rights by not voting. Knowing where we have come from and what people have fought to get to where we are today is so very important.

I have recently been reading the works of Heather Cox Richardson. She writes a daily post on Facebook and on Substack that talks about current events and puts them into historical perspective. They are long, detailed, and documented. The documented part is especially important. In a world overflowing with disinformation, being able to fact check is necessary and powerful.

You may be aware, but one of President-Elect Trump’s long standing goals has been to eliminate the Department of Education. We fought this fight throughout his first time and with his first Education Secretary, Betsy Devos. As it currently stands, Linda McMahon is on tap to be the Secretary of Education for this term. Linda McMahon has almost zero qualifications to hold this position, which makes sense when you consider the goal is to eliminate the department all together. Linda McMahon, along with her husband WWE head Vince McMahon, have also been investigated for human sex trafficking, which is not a sentence you want to be writing about the proposed head of the Department of Education.

At all levels, local, state and national, there has been an ongoing push to dismantle and privatize public education. There’s a lot of money to be made in privatizing education. And for those who want to see white Christian nationalism as the default operating system, there’s a lot of power in it. Even though I work in public libraries, I believe very strongly in public education. We all benefit from a good public education system. We have decades of data that demonstrate that when reading and graduation scores go up, crime goes down, for example. Literacy is also related to job success, long term health, and personal satisfaction and growth. And democracy is not possible without an informed electorate. Literacy and academic success is, in fact, power. Which is probably part of the reason why those who want to grab and maintain power seek to destroy our public education system.

Additional Statistics on Low Early Literacy Skills and Incarceration:

• According to the National Assessment of Adult Literacy, 2/3 of students who cannot read proficiently by the end of the fourth grade will end up in jail or on welfare.
• 85% of all juveniles who interface with the juvenile court system are functionally low literate.
• Juvenile incarceration reduces the probability of high school completion and increases the probability of incarceration later in life.
• Students who dropout of high school are 5 times more likely than high school graduates to be arrested in their lifetime.
• Students who dropout of high school are 63% more likely to be incarcerated than their peers with four-year college degrees. (source: https://governorsfoundation.org/gelf-articles/early-literacy-connection-to-incarceration/)

Heather Cox Richardson recently wrote at length on the attacks on the Department of Education saying, “As Thomas Jefferson recognized, education is fundamental to democracy, because only educated people can accurately evaluate the governmental policies that will truly benefit them.” (Source: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/LMDUU2zM51KmWJyG)

The Department of Education is also important because it is tasked with protecting the rights of some of our historically most vulnerable citizens, including those with disabilities and young girls. As the mother of both, I am particularly interested in seeing those rights continue. And as a Christian, I feel it is what my faith demands on a personal level. The leader of my faith, a man named Jesus, was very clear in his belief that whatever we do to the least of these we have also done to him, and that is a principle I tried to live my life around.

I highly recommend spending time each day learning a bit more about where we are now, how we got here, and what it means for us, our children, and our nation. There is no better place right now than reading the writings of Heather Cox Richardson to stay informed. She does a fantastic job of reaching far back into our past, connecting the dots, and putting it in context for our current times. You can find her on Facebook, Substack, or read one of her published books.

Filed under: Uncategorized