The Falls Church City Public Schools board in Virginia beclowned itself this month by voting unanimously to remove the names of founders Thomas Jefferson and George Mason from an elementary school and a high school, respectively.
The names will be removed because each of the famed Virginians owned slaves. The change, said board Chairman Greg Anderson, is “a necessary part of our equity work,” adding that it is important that the school community “feel safe, supported, and inspired.” Other board members repeated the mantra that the founders’ names made children feel “marginalized or uncomfortable.”
The board made the change in open defiance of its own survey showing that 56% of the school community, and more than two-thirds of those who expressed a definite opinion, wanted to keep the names. It also defies fiscal responsibility, with the name changes estimated to cost more than $110,000 to implement.
This pathetic, politically correct pronouncement comes from the same school board that has not figured out how to hold in-person classes since March, despite mountains of evidence that elementary and secondary schools are not primary locations for spreading the coronavirus. Even left-wing San Francisco was wise enough to reject such name changes amid the current pandemic, but not this Virginia board.
Rather than waste its time on virtue-signaling against dead white males, perhaps the board should worry more about better educating its students. One crucial part of education involves preparing children to understand and apply context. Another is to develop character, part of which comes from instilling the ability to overcome “uncomfortable” feelings while transcending a permanent sense of victimhood. Removing from schools the names of flawed but great men flies in the face of these educational imperatives. It erases context and coddles students. It is a wholly wrongheaded approach.
In adjudging historical figures, it is usually unwise to apply modern standards (and fads) to people who lived in remarkably different circumstances. The measure ought to be how far someone advanced human knowledge, beauty, freedom, or other good from the starting point where he or she found it — not whether someone falls short of our ideals of perfection today. Without such context, Jefferson, who tried to include abolitionist language in the Declaration of Independence and whose remarkable legacy inspired abolitionist President Abraham Lincoln to finish the job, is somehow less honorable than, say, segregationist former Alabama Gov. George Wallace, who defiantly stood against full equal rights for blacks long after most of the country recognized segregation’s error. But, hey, at least Wallace didn’t own slaves, right?
Wrong. Self-evidently wrong.
Few people in human history did more, in both word and deed, to free more people from more shackles than did Mason and Jefferson. Mason and Jefferson both had hard-won victories for religious liberty, and both insisted that a bill of rights was necessary to enshrine certain freedoms above the reach of infringement attempts by ordinary, temporary majorities. Mason was one of the Southern founders who was the most outspoken in proclaiming slavery as an evil — but, similar to others who felt as he did, he could not figure out, from his experience and cultural context, how rapid manumission could work.
There’s a difference between actively fighting against human progress, on one hand, and, on the other, failing to effect as much progress as one might desire. Similarly, there should be great honor in the effectuation of progress where none before existed, even if the one who helped bring it about still saw imperfectly through his own inherited prism.
Is Marie Curie less honorable as a scientist because she didn’t see the violent evils to which her nuclear discoveries could be put? Is Winston Churchill’s heroic service against Nazism to be discounted because he continued to support an only semi-autonomous colonialism? Should mankind denounce Jesus of Nazareth because his parables regularly featured references to the obedience slaves owe their masters?
At some point, the idiocy of woke revisionism must stop. Jefferson and Mason were two of the shining lights of the last millennium. By refusing to honor them, we dishonor ourselves.
