Prager U has released a new video that really gives you a solid perspective on the mindset of the hard-left and woke mob when they tear down statues and attempt to erase and rewrite our history. What’s more, it’s a mindset they don’t even understand that they have.

Author Douglas Murray, who penned the book “The Madness of Crowds,” explained well that today’s society hands the job of judging those in the past through today’s lens with no context, no understanding, and no experience. Our education system, instead, encourages students to look back through history with emotion, not logic.

It is the fruit of an education system that long ago prioritized “empathy” over facts; that believes the ultimate point of history is not to learn lessons from it, but to judge it from the pre-ordained left-wing conclusions about such ill-defined concepts as social justice, equity, and tolerance.

Apart from breeding ignorance, this kind of education invites the student (the child, really) to be judge, jury, and executioner over issues that they (and increasingly their teachers) know little or nothing about.

Because no one has bothered to teach them the nuance, complexity, and context that is history.

Murray points out that this social justice view of history has given birth to an official form of looking back at history in this kind of foolish way, the 1619 Project:

In America this impulse has culminated in The 1619 Project — an initiative started by The New York Times and now in schools everywhere — which attempts to make the arrival of the first African slaves into the American colonies the foundational date of the American republic.

1776? The American Revolution? In the new history that was just about protecting the Founders’ slave interests. These men — some of the most remarkable humans to have lived at any time — are to be understood simply by their attitude toward this one issue.

The 1619 Project seeks to portray America — the freest, most prosperous nation in world history — as exceptional only in one respect: insofar as being exceptionally bad.

Today’s students seem to know very little about our founding fathers or the amazing document they created that is the Constitution. What they do know, however, is that our founders were slave owners, and they’re being taught that the revolutionary war was just an attempt by these slave owners to maintain their privileged way of life through slavery.

As Murray points out, students don’t know that slavery was indeed a hot button topic even with the founders, some of whom tried to also make slavery illegal during the founding of the country, but this was ultimately abandoned in order to keep the newly founded union intact.

As Abraham Lincoln once pointed out, the founders did purposefully open up the abolishment of slavery down the line.

(READ: Lincoln Himself Debunked the Idea that the United States Was Founded On White Supremacy)

Murray goes on to say that it’s impossible for those of now to understand the complexities and nuances of the experiences our ancestors were going through and that blaming them for not knowing then what we know now is effectively blaming our ancestors for not seeing the future with perfect clarity.

In fact, much of what we know today to be right and wrong are things we only know because our ancestors discovered them to be. Murray uses the example of Sir Isaac Newton who rejected the idea that he was special for his discoveries, noting that he owes almost everything to the people who did work before him:

When someone tried to give Sir Isaac Newton credit for his world-changing discoveries in physics, the great man demurred. He said he was only able to achieve what he did by standing on the shoulders of the “giants” who went before him.

Today’s Left rejects Newton’s humility. It doesn’t believe that we stand on anyone’s shoulders. It imagines that if we could only liberate ourselves from the dusty, misguided, and misinformed ideas of the past then we might see further, fly still higher.

Murray rejects this thinking of the left’s outright.

“Divorced from our past we would be utterly lost,” said Murray. “We would not rise but plummet. We would be forced to start again with far less insight, and with far poorer examples as our guides.”

Murray is correct.

Imagine a group of four-year-olds given a home, a job, and a system by which to work and live in and they will likely find themselves broken and helpless in the span of a few hours. The children don’t know what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, how their situation came to be in the first place.

Parents are there to raise the child in more ways than one. It’s their job to feed and clothe, yes, but it’s also their job to teach the how’s and why’s of the world. Their garnered experience is given to the child so that the child understands what is right, what is wrong, and the proper way to go about things for maximum prosperity.

The world is much the same in that regard. We’re four-year-olds looking to those who came before us for wisdom and guidance, but the left would have us receive none and instead, look to them, a group of angry fellow four-year-olds as the end-all-be-all of knowledge and wisdom.

However, they’ve proven they know very little about the real world and how to properly deal with it. They point to failed systems, generate social issues that cause more problems than they solve, and the solutions to everything involve division in some regard.

Looking to them for answers is about the same as looking to an actual four-year-old. Instead, let’s learn the actual history and learn from the men and women who garnered wisdom from their successes and mistakes, and who also learned from their ancestors as well.

There’s a lot of knowledge the left would have us leave on the ground. We need to reject this willful ignorance.