History

It’s that time of year again when we decide what we are going to teach our kids about World and American History. The text book people have submitted their books and the reviewers are up in arms. I am not sure why teaching history is such a difficult area. Can’t we just tell the students what, where, and how it happened and let them come to their own conclusions?

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — The long-running ideological dispute over what gets taught in Texas classrooms flared anew over proposed history textbooks Tuesday, with academics decrying lessons they said exaggerate the importance of Christian values on the nation’s Founding Fathers while conservatives complained of anti-American, pro-Islam biases.

One can find a thousand (million?) quotes on the subject of history and historians. I think I have concluded that no one alive knows with certainty what happened before they were born.

Perhaps nobody has changed the course of history as much as the historians. ~Franklin P. Jones

It might be a good idea if the various countries of the world would occasionally swap history books, just to see what other people are doing with the same set of facts. ~Bill Vaughan

History… is, indeed, little more than the register of the ‘crimes, follies, and misfortunes’ of mankind. But what experience and history teach is this – that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it. ~Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, “Introduction,” 1807

If you want to know what I think happened, just ask. I am not a history scholar, but then, who is? If you weren’t there, you are just guessing, or relating someone else’s words.

There is only one reliable History of the World, and it is very select in its coverage. It was written by the only One who was and is there. You can count on that!