The Manhattan Institute has released a study of American school names, and the results should surprise no one who drops off the kids at Cactus High. Schools no longer choose the names of old dead white Presidents, perhaps because they're old, dead, and, er, well, you know. Nowadays schools are named after natural formations or animals; you're more likely to find Manatee High in Florida than William Howard Taft High--although given Taft's girth, Manatee might suffice. The study laments the missed opportunity to transmit cultural values--but in a way, Spotted Owl Middle School, with an athletic team called "The Fightin' EPA Mandates", does transmit the values of the culture. Alas.

The study faults the schools for failing to seize an opportunity; to remind kids that they belong to a culture with traditions and duties embodied by whiskered spats-wearing solons who swore on a Bible to uphold the fragile postulates of the American Experiment. True. But what do you take away from a school named for a president?

I attended William McKinley elementary school. It was a low-slung brick school stamped out from the post-war model, with glass-block windows, turquoise tiles, blonde wood cabinets. It was named for McKinley because he'd paid a campaign visit to North Dakota many years before, and this was their way of making sure we remembered. In the first-grader's imagination you have a hierarchy of authority outside the parental realm--teachers, the principal, your pastor, Commissioner Gordon, the mayor, the president, Jesus, God. A Dead President was almost a benevolent spirit hovering in the halls, hoping we did our best. Eventually we learned he'd been shot--by Leon Czolgosz, a fellow whose name sounded like he was gargling nuts and bolts. You can imagine how fifth-grade boys processed that information: cool! I mean, sad, but our school's named after a guy who got shot.

We moved on to Ben Franklin Junior High, which was even better; Ben was the guy who invented electricity using only a key, and his name also adorned the local five-and-dime that always smelled of popcorn and parakeets. But there were no portraits of Ben. No homilies on thrift chiseled over the door. No whispered tales of his French dalliances, or bifocal-grinding lessons in shop class. Still, at least we knew who he was, and if you polled any 7th grader, he would have named Ben as his favorite president, no doubt.

In North Dakota the naming of the schools after Presidents and founding politicians seems to have been a mid-century idea; the old High School was named Central. Another middle school was named Agassiz, after the geologist who lent his name to the ancient lake that once covered our town. When new high schools were built to replace Central--they burned. As schools were wont to do in those days, they went by the evocative names of Fargo North and Fargo South. The athletic team for Fargo North was the Spartans, chosen no doubt out of ignorance of that culture's true nature. We didn't spend our tenth grade winter banished to stubbled wheat fields fending off wolves with sharpened rocks, and no one told us about Thermopylae. Good thing, too. They would have made it a Vietnam parallel.

Worry more, perhaps, about the curriculum. British schools have made recommendations for their new textbooks, and to the ire and fury of the old guard, Churchill's off the list of must-learn subjects. You can probably imagine why: school districts, strapped for cash, simply can't afford enough copies of Photoshop to remove the cigars. He drank; he growled out unapologetic defenses of Empire; he was a rather unicultural fellow who would have championed "gay marriage" until you explained what you really meant, and then you'd have gotten a look that resembled a bulldog trying to pass an pincushion through his small intestine.

It's easy to magnify these events, conflate them into a horror of PC mandates that regard the past as a roiling sea of ignorance from which no lessons can be drawn, and whose baleful influence can be softened if we herd the kids into schools named after perennial flowers and suffragettes. It's not that bad. It was never that good. But as the hoary adage puts it: Those who ignore the past are doomed to repeat it. We're also told that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. It seems apt that we'll accomplish all of the above, and add our own embellishment to the maxims: we will ignore our past except where it flatters our present concerns, then repeat it without the knowledge that we've been through this before. War? But the sensible people had decided it was bad for children and other living things; the posters said so. Fascism? But that's a word you use to describe the Patriot Act, which required all copies of Dixie Chicks Cds to be flushed down the toilet at Gitmo, or something like that. Presidents? Mere men. The long struggle for liberty? Dead guys with guns. Who knows how much all that musket smoke helped Global Warming.

History. The Inconvenient Sooth.