History repeats itself

Like Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris of Columbine infamy, the 16-year-old Minnesota student who went on a shooting rampage at his high school on March 21 was male, troubled and a fan of Adolf Hitler.

But unlike Klebold, Harris and most of the other perpetrators of such murderous rampages, Jeff Weise was not white. In a series of posts on a neo-Nazi site, he purportedly identified himself as a Native American who was concerned about racial mixing.

According to The Guardian, Weise wrote, "When I was growing up, I was taught (like others) that Nazi's were (are) evil and that Hitler was a very evil man ... Upon reading up on his actions, the ideals and issues the German Third Reich addressed, I began to see how much of a lie had been painted about them." He went on: "It's hard though, being a Native American National Socialist, people are so misinformed, ignorant, and close minded it makes your life a living hell."

Ignorant indeed. Had Weise known more about his hero, he would have been aware that Hitler, as described by biographer John Toland, "often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America's extermination - by starvation and uneven combat - of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity."

It is doubtful that an accurate history lesson alone could have averted Weise's actions. And the teaching of tolerance can go only so far. But in the wake of such an act, it's hard not to wonder if a combination of the two - a curriculum that combined the teaching of history and of tolerance - might not have made some small difference in the sum balance.

At a time when the cable network C-Span puts forward Holocaust denier David Irving as a worthy counterpoint to legitimate historian Deborah Lipstadt, we need all the education we can get. And knowledge, the kind that comes from a solid education, is one of the few tools we can give our children to fight bigotry and hate.

The public school system is not to blame for the tragedy in Minnesota. But the event underscores the urgency of what should be one of this country's priorities: saving our public schools and the children in them, of whom Weise is only one particularly dramatic example.

A recent study, published in The New York Times, pronounced President Bush's No Child Left Behind a resounding failure. Where is the outcry? It should come largely from the Jewish community, whose immigrant forebears' introduction to American society often came through this country's fundamentally democratic public school system. Today, in the face of an even greater population in need, that system is but a shadow of its former self.

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