I offer this without much in the way of commentary except to note two things:

1. The pleasure I felt in reading a piece that, essentially, mirrors my view on the need for a sense of national unity that should be taught to our children.
2. The fact is that the writer is a touch over-kind to the system here in America. Not in the idealized view of that educational system, but in the uneven application by people who are essentially unfriendly to the idea that children should be taught that the American way (if you’ll pardon the expression) might have some advantage over systems in other parts of the world. Regardless of the evidence that our path does have tremendous advantage over, say, the overly-socialized government programs of “old Europe” or the theocracies of the Middle East, the actual expression of admiration for those advantages is often considered to be so crass, insensitive, and downright judgmental that it marks the commentary as being unenlightened.
   
   One of the greatest dangers facing the United States is that so many of her citizens no longer believe that she is special or worthy of admiration.

These things said, the writer of this piece in the Telegraph understands the need for a level of national pride and admiration in the citizens of the West. And a persuasive bit of writing it is.

...[A]s we have apparently now realised, being a country that absorbs migrants involves rather more than taking in lodgers and leaving them to get on with it. Multiculturalism may have been dressed up as cosmopolitan virtue but, at heart, it was a rationale for not really giving a damn, and a cover for the least attractive British traits - intellectual laziness, indifference to the needs of other people, complacency, and contempt for any sort of energetic commitment to a social ideal.

Well, the serious thinking starts now - as usual in Britain, at five minutes past midnight. The lodgers - or, more to the point, their children - clearly need to be offered a bit more than a key to the front door and a reminder not to leave the landing light on. Much has been made of this country’s failure to give any instruction to incomers on the essentials of Britishness - whatever that is - and their consequent lack of any sense of national identity. To this end, acres of newsprint and hours of broadcasting time have been devoted to producing a defining sense of what it means to be British.

Read the rest.

Update: Kindly linked by Iowa Voice.