Some Standard Wisdom for Converting Blacks

Less than a month into this series, I already feel the need to sound the reminder that in quoting some of these articles, my intent is not to endorse or make light of or even to stand in judgment of some of the darker sides of late nineteenth century thought. This warrants particular restatement with the following article by J. W. Crenshaw. It would be easy to read the below and assume either that my intent is racist or callous or anarchonistically judgmental. It is none of these. Instead, the following article sounds, among other things, a pair of themes that I have tried to reiterate here in various ways. The first is the need to complicate the narrative of the Civil War that we all learned in school: the North invaded the South to free the slaves and give blacks their rights. Historians have almost entirely abandoned this carefully constructed fiction, but the public still casts the Civil War in these terms, failing to see the stark racism and paternalism that dominated in the North no less than the South. The other is the sinister overtones that education often takes on in the hands of progressives. It's a message that has ongoing merit.

Even if neither of these themes were present, however, the following is important to read both for those in the Stone-Campbell Movement because it is part of our collective history the consequences of which we continue to live with in the de facto racial segregation of our churches and for Americans in general who need to be forced to read chapters of our history which serve neither to glorify US nationalism or to provide the starting point in a narrative of national redemption. What follows in "Difficulties in Christianizing the Colored Race" is precisely the shades of grey that we all need to grapple with in the formation of our historical consciousness.

As to what the future of the colored race of America is to be, socially, politically or religiously, we do not believe any one can conjecture with any degree of accuracy. Naturally superstitious and with their race prejudices to contend with, we approach them more from a sense of Christian duty than from any hope of achieving grand results. To succeed in our mission work among them we must agree upon some decided policy. If properly approached, we do not believe that there is a better missionary field in the world.

Experience has proven that we can not reach them through the preaching of white men. The colored leaders now, excepting a few, are ignorant and superstitious. In what direction, then, does hope lie? Certainly not in this shouting generation. The hope and the only hope, speaking from experience, is in the children. And when we educate a few colored men, as we have been doing for this work, we must not measure their success by converts made. The children, who are just learning to read, are the ones most benefited. Those whom we send out must be impressed with the importance of continuing to sound into the ears of the auditors that Christianity is something more than shouting the clothes off in the first part of the night, and serving Satan the balance of the night. We need to select young men of good character to educate them for this work. There are brethren among us who have the means to help build such a school as we need for this purpose. With the plain gospel plea that we have, if loving liberal hearts, could be interested in this work, in the next generation many of the difficulties that now so hinder our progress could be surmounted, and thousands of this unfortunate race could be Christianized.

Brethren, this is a question worthy of the attention of every Christian.

Denying the Holocaust: Albany Teacher Suspended for Teaching Nazism

The Nazis are stealing your children!

Nazis are bad. I learned that lesson in high school like everyone else, though, let's be honest, we all knew that Nazis were bad before we ever made it to high school. Nevertheless, that is the lesson I was taught. Nothing more; nothing less. At Albany High School in New York, one teacher tried to take this lesson a little further in three sophomore English classes:

As part of the 10th grade English persuasive writing assignment, the Albany High students were asked to pretend their teacher is a Nazi government official who must be convinced they believe Jews are the source of Germany's problems: "You must argue that Jews are evil, and use solid rationale from government propaganda to convince me of your loyalty to the Third Reich!"

The teacher is on leave, facing possible termination, because school officials and government leaders were appalled. Said Superintendent Vanden Wyngaard, "You asked a child to support the notion that the Holocaust was justified, that's my struggle. It's an illogical leap for a student to make." Said New York City Councilmen David Greenfield, "The teacher responsible for coming up with and assigning students with this task must be held accountable for attempting to indoctrinate children with anti-Semitic beliefs." Said Director of the Jewish Federation Shelly Shapiro "It's not how you teach about how prejudice has led to genocide."

Well it certainly was not how I was taught that prejudice led to genocide. I learned, "Prejudice leads to genocide. It happened with the Nazis. So don't be prejudiced like the Nazis." And that was it. Something tells me that Shapiro is short-selling the pedagogical value of what is happening here. These students, in addition to learning a valuable lesson in English (because no creative writer has only had to write the perspective of laudable characters with whom everyone agrees), would take away from this assignment a powerful and deep understanding of not merely the tired truism that "prejudice has led to genocide" but an experience of precisely how it led to genocide. It teaches the student, in the most basic way, what it was to be a civilian in Nazi Germany, under a government that flooded the intellectual marketplace with antisemitic propaganda and expected you to learn a new cultural script to mirror it. The applications extend far beyond merely a better grasp of the history of 1930s Germany to a life lesson in the way propaganda continues to be employed and continues to shape the thinking of citizens around the world. Some clever honors student might even have concluded that the consumption of media in contemporary America might be shaping his or her thought in similar ways.

Renowned scholar of religion and American culture Stephen Prothero draws much the same conclusion:

I think it’s Greenfield who is lacking in common sense here. And it's the superintendent who is being illogical.

I suppose it is possible that the teacher is a closet Nazi attempting to reconstruct the Third Reich in Albany. But isn’t it more likely that he or she is trying to teach students about the dangers of propaganda and the horrors of the Holocaust?

Consider the student who felt “horrible” about doing this assignment. Is that really a bad thing? How are high school students today supposed to feel about Nazism and the Holocaust?

Apparently, what they are supposed to feel (and think) is nothing, because the lesson high school teachers are going to take away from this fiasco is to avoid this topic at all costs, lest they risk losing their jobs.

Prothero points to a further dimension of "this fiasco," the special place of the Holocaust in the American imagination. Historian John Fea has pointed out that if the principles espoused here to teaching the Holocaust were universally applied, teachers could no longer teach the thinking of Puritans who killed witches, settlers who killed Native Americans, southerners who kept slaves, nativist who oppressed Catholic immigrants, etc. What a moralistic history we are left with! And an incomplete history at that, a half history. Of course, no one would ever suggest hamstringing historians on those topics because they are not blessed by the kind of special pleading that surrounds the Holocaust. There is no villain like Hitler, no enormity like the Holocaust, and no racism like antisemitism. That, in the end, is the kind of lesson we were taught by the two-dimensional treatment of Nazism in school. No depth, no perspective, because the history of Nazism is alone a truly simple matter in history. It is a lesson against thinking for most students, and it is a tragedy that this teacher should suffer for bringing thought--in the form of an entertaining thought experiment the like of which I never enjoyed in high school or college--back into the subject of Nazism.

I hope the teacher is reinstated, because termination over something so ridiculous is unthinkable. I also hope the teacher is fired, because to take any punishment, even a slap on the wrist, and then return willingly to that environment of educational repression strikes me as a tacit admission that the teacher actually did something wrong. Of course, the teacher is probably sitting at home now worrying about paying bills, working long enough to retire some day, and coping with social ostracism. So what I really hope is that whatever the teacher wants happens. It's a shame that it had to go this far.

History for History's Sake

In his 1969 article, "Second Thoughts on History at the Universities," British historian Sir Geoffrey Elton made the following recommendation:

Teachers of history must set their faces against the necessarily ignorant demands of 'society'...for immediate applicability. They need to recall that the 'usefulness' of historical studies lies hardly at all in the knowledge they purvey and in the understanding of specific present problems from their prehistory; it lies much more in the fact that they produce standards of judgment and powers of reasoning which they alone develop which arise from the very essence, and which are unusually clear-headed, balanced and compassionate.

Elton's view is likely to win at least public support from many academic historians, as much as it is equally likely to elicit public scorn from just about everyone else, particularly those outside of the humanities (and of those particularly scientists for whom usefulness is assumed, in the discipline if not always in the particular research project). Yet, in truth most historians today go to great lengths to contort themselves and their work to conform to expectations of social relevance. Every new paper, every new book is subjected to one degree or another to questions not just of how it advances human knowledge but how it might benefit human society. Most defenses are theoretical and superficial, but that they must be made at all reveals something.

It would be easy, not to mention self-serving, for me to now turn and defend a universal application of Elton's advice that history be pursued without regard for usefulness. After all, I have spent most of my admittedly short academic career studying the most utterly useless facts jotted into the marginalia of history. The more esoteric, the more alluring. But critics of the humanities in general and history in particular are largely correct. Rightly gone are the days when the government could and would subsidize the pursuit of knowledge of the sake of knowledge, particularly knowledge which has no clear future applicability. History is, in this respect, the worst academic offender.

Yet Elton is correct when his own language is allowed to limit the scope of his observation. The above are from reflections on "history at universities" and directed at "teachers of history." As history continues to be rightly scrutinized for its social value, it is important not to transfer criticisms of professional historians onto the discipline as a whole. Historical thinking--rather than the academic fruits of the professionalized application of historical thought--is in fact a necessary tool. It has been rightly observed that all humans are historical thinkers, existing as much in their reflection on their individual (and on our collective social) past as they do in the present. The "standards of judgment" and "powers of reasoning" that characterize self-conscious historical thought are crucial tools in the continued functioning of our species. If we allow our critique of ivory tower academics to come to bear on the general curriculum--in universities, but also in high school or middle school as well--then we jeopardize the intellectual future of our children.

It is not uncommon now--and this is true both of where I went to school and of the university I work for now--that undergraduates can be expected to take more than twice as much science as history, regardless of their intended field. The deeply incorrect assumption here is that people on average will need more biology in their lives than, for example, American history, more familiarity with chem-lab safety protocol than the causes and consequences of the communist revolution in China. The devaluing in the public mind of history, abetted as it has been by the increasing specialization in the discipline (e.g. a professor I know who studies only the history of agricultural technology in the plantation South), is poised to create a generation of historically and culturally illiterate actors, agents in the making of our ongoing history.

Detachment

I recently had the opportunity to watch the film Detachment, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. The ensemble cast, led by veteran Adrien Brody and accompanied by Sami Gayle in a stunning film debut, presents us with a picture that is quirky and unexpectedly funny, but, overall, deeply unsettling. Most importantly, Detachment condenses into a startlingly plausible caricature all those problems which can and do coincide to make the American educational system so frequently and deeply prone to disaster: underfunding, absentee parenting, unchecked bullying, an undeserved sense of entitlement (for both students and parents), teen depression, promiscuity, the conflicting priorities for educators and administrators, sexual paranoia, disciplinary impotence, the practical application of ideologically conceived legislation, the inevitable bleeding in of teachers' personal lives into the workplace, violence, a culture which promotes disrespect, and, finally, almost inevitably, teacher burnout. As could be expected, Detachment is gritty and vulgar, meaning that those whose sensibilities or ethics would be violated by the foul language, the violence, or the nudity should forgo this particular film. But since real life isn't suitable for broadcast on ABC Family, Detachment takes the reality, actual or merely potential, and slaps the viewer across the face with it. It is a necessary service.

Beware the Boogeyman

The still striking teachers of Chicago have raised the possibility of continuing their strike in spite of new concessions by the city and a fresh deal on the table. What could possibly justify this? It is the possibility that, because of declining performance and enrollment, the city may be forced to close as many as 120 schools over the next year. The real enemy here, though, is not school closures but that now familiar bugaboo of charter schools.

"The mayor and his hedge fund allies are going to replace our democratically controlled public schools with privately run charter schools. This will have disastrous results," union president Karen Lewis wrote in an opinion column in the Chicago Sun-Times on Saturday.

Disastrous indeed. Never mind that 12% of Chicago schools are already charter schools "run by philanthropists." Never mind that, on a national scale, charter schools' "academic performance record compared with community schools is mixed." Never mind that the charter schools have never been responsible for the prolonged absence of 350,000 students from the classroom (and have, in fact, done what they can to pick up the slack during the strike). If empty or malfunctioning schools are closed down and replaced with charter schools, the ground may very well open up and swallow Chicago whole. God knows, it's happened to less corrupt populations.

Religious Freedom, American Style

Here is a wonderful example of American religious freedom in action, in ways which don't center on ancillary disputes with theoretical Christians fringes and which present a direct and powerful contrast between the way Americans and Europeans treat the "eccentricities" of religious minorities:

California employers face new restrictions against shunting Sikh and Muslim workers out of public view for wearing turbans, beards and hijabs, under a bill signed Saturday by Gov. Jerry Brown.

The measure could affect workplaces from Disneyland to San Quentin Prison.

"This bill, AB 1964, makes it very clear that wearing any type of religious clothing or hairstyle, particularly such as Sikhs do … is protected by law and nobody can discriminate against you because of that," Brown told some 400 Sikhs and supporters at a rally of the North American Punjabi Assn. on the steps of the Capitol. Brown also signed SB 1540, which requires the state Board of Education to consider a new history framework for schools that the governor said will include "the role and contributions of the Sikh community in California."

Unfortunately, California has also proved its ongoing and incomprehensible commitment to reduce the history classroom to an instrument for producing political capital.

The Chicago Strike

It is day three of the Chicago teachers' strike, and I had sincerely hoped that it would come and go before I needed to comment on it. There is too much to be frustrated about here to condense into a few short sentences. Certainly the false sentiment that "both sides have the best interests of the students at heart" never fails to amaze. Obviously they don't, otherwise the teachers never would have considered striking and the school board never would have allowed a strike. At any cost. More frustrating to me, however, is this nonsense:

The board proposal would leave some 28% of teachers in danger of dismissal within two years, he said, calling that "an insult to our profession."

Do you know what's really insulting? That teachers think theirs is the only job you can suck at without getting fired. I realize that isn't the most eloquent argument I have ever constructed, but my reactions to 350,000 students being refused the already deficient education the state is offering them because teachers who are already making twice what my wife does have undertaken a self-righteous quest for a self-serving "educational justice" prompts a reaction in me more visceral than intellectual. At the end of the day, the problem with education is not the possible lack of continuity that comes from a higher turnover rate for teachers but the motivational impotence of an entrenched tenure system. We don't just need to pay teachers less, we need to fire more of them. Trim the fat, as it were, and let fresh blood in. It is time to treat teaching like other occupation: perform or find another profession. It's that simple.

Pay Teachers Less

The American education system is broken. There are few if any who would argue otherwise. The problems are by no means simple, and the possible solutions are numerous. The administrative overhead of schools is one of the most obvious and easily resolved issues. Superintendents, principals, assistant principals, computer technicians, evaluators, social workers, security guards, secretaries, and countless other occupations which are not directly involved in the education of children, as well as the facilities needed to house this massive bureaucracy, eat up a disproportionate amount of taxpayer dollars. Consolidate the administrations, cut those positions, and slash those salaries. Bureaucrats should not be making four and five times the teachers in the trenches.

Numerous other problems do not lend themselves so easily to correction. The massive effort to centralize and standardize education has removed control from the people who should be served by, and therefore should control, the education process. Curriculum has become a political battleground, with the Right wanting schools to teach intelligent design and nationalistic propaganda and the Left wanting them to teach homosexual history and sexual liberation. The focus on variety—in learning styles, teaching methods, and more—has made education more about entertainment than learning. Teachers unions protect inept teachers, and the tenure system makes it impossible for new, highly qualified teachers to find good jobs.

Even more basic still, and therefore more difficult to change, is a set of cultural assumptions at all levels of society that hamstrings the education process. Parents aren’t interested in engaging with their children’s education. Students have no motivation to apply themselves. Decades of universal, compulsory education through secondary school has made graduation more a right than an accomplishment. The confusion of equal opportunity with equal ability creates an educational environment where teachers must teach to the least capable student, leaving those best able and most interested in learning to fend for themselves. Everyone thinks the system has malfunctioned, and everyone knows whose fault it is: not mine.

My vision for a functional education system would scrap the present manifestation of public education entirely, but if we’re discussing what to do with what we have, I have an unusual suggestion: pay teachers less. That, of course, flies in the face of conventional wisdom (which is a sanitized way of saying “campaign rhetoric”) and some unconventional experiments. There is a mindset which says that the problem with American schools is that education does not pay enough to attract the best and brightest that universities have to offer. If teachers were paid in a way comparable to other certified professionals, then maybe the kind of people we attract to be nurses, doctors, engineers, and lawyers would want to be teachers instead. My wife is a teacher, and so I understand acutely the attractiveness of raising teacher salaries and even the unfairness of their salaries relative to their workloads.

Baiting university students with the promise of more money, however, misunderstands the basic problem. American colleges are not under-producing qualified teachers. In fact, there are so many new teachers being sent out into the workforce, they can’t all find jobs. The ones that can find jobs, often find them as substitutes, teaching assistants, interim teachers, or as unprepared, ill-equipped new teachers in dangerous inner city schools. It is hard to imagine many people who actually spend time around teachers and hear about their problems directly (and constantly) honestly believe that the problem is that they simply lack the skill or financial motivation to do their jobs right.

Here’s the real problem. If my wife is a third grade teacher—and she isn’t, but bear with me—everyday she is faced with the same enigma. In her class she has little Bobby who is reading at a sixth grade level but still hasn’t mastered his multiplication tables. She also has little Sarah who is functionally illiterate but already has a rudimentary grasp of fourth grade math concepts. Little Mitchell is right on track with his learning if only my wife can convince him to sit in his seat and do his work. Little Rene is always too sleepy to pay attention, while little Marcus still doesn’t have a working grasp of conversational English. In addition to these five, she has twenty to twenty-five more students, equally diverse. Now, it doesn’t matter if you are Stephen Hawking and Steve Jobs and Mister Rogers all rolled up into one. There is no way anyone, no matter how qualified and no matter how well-paid, is going to come up with a multi-subject day of learning that is going to meet most or all of the needs of that class. Teaching devolves into learning-themed crowd management. In seven years, my wife is teaching tenth grade: Bobby is in remedial math, Sarah is cheating her way through high school English, Mitchell is on ADHD medication that has retarded his learning, Rene is pregnant, and Marcus is the father. The problem is compounded.

At $35,000 a year, my wife certainly isn’t getting paid enough to deal with that, even if it is only for nine months out of the year. It is hard to imagine, however, that one teacher making $60,000 is going to be able to solve the problem any better. On the other hand, two teachers making $30,000 each and managing two separate classes of only ten students each might just make a dent. Sure, there is still going to be diversity that needs to be overcome. Students will still present unique problems that will distract from an ideal educational environment. Some potential teachers might even be diverted from entering the field because of the reduced pay (though other ways to incentivize, such as broader loan forgiveness, could easily compensate for that). In the end, however, the net result will be a shift from the current reality of crowd management closer to an ideal experience of educational mentorship.

Of course, you could never actually pay teachers less. The unions wouldn’t allow it (and frankly, with the cost of getting a degree reaching meteoric heights, teachers couldn’t afford it). But it was never realistic to raise teacher salaries either, as that would inevitably cut into the lucrative business of multiplying administrative positions and bloating educational bureaucracies. Still, isn’t it nice to imagine a world where teachers could afford to train themselves to become educators and then actually be allowed to educate children? It distracts from the unsettling reality of one twenty-four year old woman in inner-city Atlanta trying desperately to get thirty nine-year-olds to meet state and national proficiency benchmarks on standardized tests so that she can continue to make payments on her six figure student loan debt. It’s almost as if prayer in schools isn’t really the issue after all.

Acronymania: LCU and OCU join NCAA

Congratulations to Oklahoma Christian University and Lubbock Christian University. They're joining Abilene Christian, Harding, Lipscomb, Pepperdine, and Ohio Valley as Church of Christ affiliated universities competing athletically in the NCAA. It is interesting--a term intended to be without judgment--to see how far the Churches of Christ have come.

Let's Talk about Sex

I recently watched the 2009 documentary Let's Talk About Sex. The stated purpose of the film is to examine adolescent sexuality and to try to understand alarming trends in American culture, such as rates of teen pregnancy and teen STD contraction significantly above that of any other "developed" Western nation. In truth, the documentary is a forthright apology for comprehensive sex education in schools and a frank criticism of abstinence-only education as an alternative. Everything else which is discussed is done so more-or-less as a footnote. This is not intended as a criticism; the filmmakers do very little to hide this motivating intention. Why should they? The nature of sex education is a matter of intense debate because it has real and dramatic consequences. When we realize that 7% of all women in America will become pregnant before they turn twenty and that, of those pregnancy that might otherwise be carried to term, 30% will end in elective abortion, it is hard to imagine anyone not concerned. The documentary rightly concludes that everyone wants the same thing: fewer teen STDs, fewer teen pregnancies, and fewer teen abortions.

To that end, the documentary offers at least three suggestions which, though by no means novel, warrant constant reiteration until they come to fruition:

• Comprehensive sex education in schools:  The film cites studies which have shown there to be no correlation between abstinence only education and decreased rates of pregnancy or STDs.  While this alone is not enough to commend comprehensive sex education, it is hard not to look over to Western Europe with the remarkably low rates of teen pregnancy and STDs and wonder what our public education system is doing wrong.  The government has a legitimate public interest in preventing teen pregnancies and STDs, and the filmmakers rightly point out that the health hazard created by (or at least correlated with) teen ignorance costs the government multiple billions of dollars annually.
  
• Greater involvement and candor from the religious community: Sex education is not simply a public health concern.  It is a moral and existential concern as well, and because of that it is imperative that the faith community take an active role in educating America's youth about sex.  At its most compelling, the film displays ministers earnestly seeking to balance moral truth with the pressing needs of adolescents in their congregations.  One commenter rightly points out that there was a time when the church was engaged meaningfully on social issues in a way not so readily reduced into the kind of moralizing which is only profitable for an audience to whom it is not applicable.  Preachers preach hellfire and abstinence, parents nudge their young children into purity pledges, and adolescents are swept along in ignorance.  The church needs to stop teaching teen classes on Song of Solomon and then washing their hands of their youth.
  
• Parent centered solutions:  The church is not and should not be the most directly formative influence on an adolescent's life, and the state infinitely less so.  A great deal of the blame for the culture surrounding sex and particularly adolescent sex in America falls on parents.  Particularly guilty are those multitudes of parents who deflect responsibility onto the schools and churches, refusing to bring the issue of sex into the home except for a single, awkward, trite "birds and the bees" talk at the onset of puberty.  Surely parents haven't forgotten adolescence; surely they remember that sex is not something their teenagers think about once at thirteen, make a decision about, and then are never troubled again.  Sex pervades society, and even if it didn't, sex would still dominate the hormone addled mind of teenagers.  If parents really cared about their teen, cared more than they care about their comfort, they would be engaged regularly and openly.

While I wholeheartedly embrace the above as legitimate steps to be taken to mitigate the fall out from inevitable teen sex, there are problems with the way they are often presented and with the way the documentary presents them.  One of the reasons the issue has become so charged and why people who agree on the ends cannot unite on any common means is because people from both sides have too thoroughly draped their solutions with their peculiar ideologies.  It is no wonder that comprehensive sex education smacks of libertinism much in the same way that abstinence only sex education smacks of fideism.  Correctives are needed:

• The public interest is a health interest: The state does have a legitimate interest in educating teenagers about sex, but the legitimacy of that interest does not legitimize the state offering up a normative ideology through the education system.  The very fact that comprehensive sex education is being used for this ought to raise deafening alarms in the Orwellian corners of our brain.  Comprehensive sex education needs to be comprehensive only in terms of its factual, scientific information and only as far as is prudent for preventing unwanted pregnancies and STDs.  Teach teens about diseases: how they are contracted, how they are treated, and how they are prevented.  Teach teens about pregnancy: how it happens and how it is prevented.  Demonstrate contraceptive use, offer resources for obtaining those contraceptives, discuss issues of consent (e.g. what constitutes "date rape"), and the importance of being assertive in demanding that you and your partner practice safe sex.  The legitimate concerns of the state end there, but for some reason that hasn't stopped some programs from tacitly or even explicitly passing qualitative judgements on sexual behavior.  They want to teach an ideology that homosexuality is good, that sexual experimentation is good, that anything is good provided it is done safely and consensually.  The documentary shows over and over sex education material that uses terms like "good," "healthy," "beautiful," and "fun."  The state should not be making those qualitative determinations.  Their job is to define what is legal; it falls to others to debate what is good.
  
• The church does not need to abandon ideology:  The church, unlike the state, has a duty to make qualitative and moral judgments, and it is not the place of the government to restrict or direct those judgments.  Unfortunately, however, most of the churches that were shown actively participating in rigorous sex education were churches of a unabashedly liberal bent.  This leaning showed through clearly in the way they approached sex education, and the viewer might get the impression that the only way a church could be involved in sex education in a way that would please the filmmakers would be if they were conferring divine approbation on the secular sex agenda.  This need not be the case, however.  Churches, even conservative churches, can legitimately engage in rigorous and thorough sex education while continuing to make the argument that premarital sex is a moral evil and promoting heteronormative sexual ethics.  It is the ridiculously shallow "sex is bad if you do it before your married" line, coupled with vacuous purity ceremonies, that has made the church culpable in the crisis of teen sexuality, particularly the startling number of devout teens engaging in para-intercourse sex acts with impunity because "technically" they are still virgins.  A comprehensive, faith based sex education plan can make great strides in alleviating not only social, but moral and existential ills.  Begin with the truth that human sexuality, like everything else, is God-created, wonderful in its appropriate context, and devastating when improperly employed.  Acknowledge the intensity of temptation and the universality of human frailty.  Create an environment of accountability that minimizes shame and maximizes the edifying value of confession.  Most importantly, make the commitment ongoing.  Youth ministers and their congregations need to be thinking about sex as often as their teens are and devoting a proportionate amount of time and energy to their sex-related efforts.  Just because a church is seriously committed to sex education does not mean that they need to adopt the value judgements of liberal sexual ethics.
  
• It isn't enough just to shift the blame to parents:  Everyone knows that parents need to be more involved.  The government has said it.  The churches have said it.  Even many parents, often hypocritically, have said it.  But just as parents are too often guilty of shifting the responsibility onto schools and churches, society seems largely uninterested in actually equipping and encouraging parents to talk to their children about sex education.  It is time that schools and churches made a greater effort to ensure that parents had both the tools and the motivation to be active in the sex education of their teens.  The documentary made a positive exhibition of a number of very progressive parents (e.g. parents who gave their teens condoms for their birthdays, who let their teens' significant others spend the night, who joked around the dinner table about their teens' sex life) but what was most striking is that many of the parents on display were just as ignorant as their teens.  They didn't know the statistics about sex or the myths that were floating around among teenagers.  There are some parents, paradoxically (and we shift out of the documentary and into personal experience here), who aren't even entirely sure of the mechanics of sex, pregnancy, and STDs.  Parents would benefit from programs offered by schools and churches specifically designed to educate parents about adolescent sex issues and about how to talk to teens about sex.  Small, interactive gatherings with teachers, counselors, and members of the clergy have significant advantages over whatever thirty year old "How to talk to your kids about sex" book that a parent might buy off Amazon.

Whatever its obvious biases and deficiencies--particularly in terms of proposing concrete, unifying solutions--Let's Talk About Sex is a documentary worth watching.  It is probably one even worth watching with teens, be they your children, your class, your youth groups, or your friends.  The film is informative yet entertaining, remarkably clean given the subject matter, and has tremendous heuristic value.  If nothing else, it can function as a great launching point for the conversations we all ought to have been having all along.  The issue is obviously too pressing for Americans to stick their heads into the sand and hope it goes away.

The Fallacy of "More Accurate" History

In some work he has done for The Modern Scholar series, James W. Loewen tackles one of his favorite subjects: what the standard history narrative gets wrong. What Loewen offers is a cursory but accurate critique of the way history is perceived by the general public. History is not, as it is often presented, the simple and objective recording of what really happened. It is the ordering of what happened through the lens of the historian. As Loewen describes it, history is as much about forgetting as remembering. We forget not only that material which is deemed unimportant (by our fluid and largely arbitrary modern measure) but what is deemed objectionable. History is like building a dresser from IKEA. The builder has a vision of what the finished product should look like and constructs it to the the best of his ability. If there should happen to be some unaccounted for pieces leftover at the end that don't seem to fit anywhere, they can be discarded as unnecessary, extraneous. That is why so much history--like so much build it yourself furniture--doesn't stand up to the test of time.

Like so many thoughtful historians, however, Loewen suffers from short-term memory loss. One of the ways he prefers to evaluate the popular understanding of history is to look at grade school textbooks and state historical markers. He uses both to make his point that history often says more about the time when it was written than about the time it supposedly records. Specifically with historical markers, he suggests that a Gettysburg marker is more likely to reveal something about the 1960s when it was erected than the 1860s it describes. It is then, curiously, that Loewen makes an almost unbelievable suggestion. He states that, in his travels, he finds that the more recently a marker was set up, the more accurate it is.

Without a hint of irony, the professor genuinely seems to argue that modern man has begun to correct the inherent bias in history. It never seems to occur to him that, rather than being more accurate, recent historical markers simply more nearly align themselves to what Loewen himself has termed the prevailing mythology of the time. Loewen, in his quest for more accurate textbooks and markers, seems to have completely forgotten his criticism which cuts to the very heart of how history is done. There is no past apart from the present and the contemporary paradigm through which history is reconstructed. History is not an artifact which is picked up and held, measured and weighed. It is the constellation of supposed facts which makes sense in the present only by passing through the prism of our historiographical biases. In thirty years (or for that matter, at the rate of our current progress, in five) the landscape of how history is done and the theories which govern its writing will be so drastically unrecognizable that Loewen's own meticulously accurate textbooks will be subject to the same kind of criticism he leveled against the textbooks of the 1960s (and, in turn, that they leveled against those of the 1940s, on and on ad nauseum).

Loewen's argument would be better made if he could slip out of the modern fallacy of objective accuracy in subjective pursuits like history and allow instead there to be more constructive measures of the value of historical work. It is more appropriate to say that recent markers and textbooks better reflect contemporary understandings of history or better measure up to current historical standards or even, as would seem to be Loewen's main concern, more closely align the popular reconstruction of history with the high academic reconstruction of history. Ultimately, it all boils down to whether or not the history currently being propagated in our schools and our public consciousness is functional and beneficial for our society. As does Loewen, I would contend that it is not. The correct charge to be made to historians is not, however, simply to create more accurate histories--as if such a mythic goal were even possible--but to press for a public history which is both defensible (based on the facts as we understand them through our chosen historiographical lenses) and pragmatic (based on the function of history in constructing, preserving, and benefiting society).

The Scariest Teacher Ever

In an interview on The Daily Show last night, US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told Jon Stewart:

We need to educate our way to a better economy.

Meanwhile, eighteen years ago, historian Eugene Genovese wrote:

Despite considerable internal diversity and dissent, the political and ideological organs of the Left have typically suffered from the congenital disease of a utopianism based on the assumption of human goodness or of a morally neutral human nature that must be shaped by education--which often means manipulated by an elite that invokes the rhetoric of egalitarianism and anti-elitism.

Then later in the interview on The Daily Show, Duncan said:

We need to educate our way to a better economy.

A Reading Recommendation for the Illiterate

Stephen Prothero's Religious Literacy undertakes in a brief span to quantify, explain, and propose corrections for the rampant religious illiteracy of Americans. In simpler terms, Prothero attempts to unravel the paradox that, while Europeans tend to be religiously knowledgeable and irreligious, Americans are pious and religiously ignorant. Religious Literacy is too short a work, at just under 150 pages of actual exposition, to argue any of its points substantially, but this is just as well because Prothero is not covering any radically new ground. Instead, the work functions as an interesting resource both as an introduction for those who, as part of their general religious ignorance, are unaware that there is a problem and as a synthesis for those who are already plagued by worry about our collective idiocy. The book is carefully organized along three lines of thought:

What is the problem?

This is by far the most gripping section of Prothero's work, not because he uncovers a problem which we are all startled to find exists but because he quantifies it in ways that highlight its embarrassing severity. It is here that Prothero shocks the reader with a rapid succession of ever more embarrassing facts: one in five evangelicals believes in reincarnation, most American adults cannot name even one of the four Gospels, most American adults cannot name the first book of the Bible, a significant percentage of high school seniors believe Sodom and Gomorrah were husband and wife, only one in three Americans can correctly identify Jesus as the person who delivered the Sermon on the Mount, and one in ten Americans believes that Joan of Arc was Noah's wife. These facts, gathered from scientific surveys, are interspersed with more anecdotal tributes to American religious ignorance: a woman who believes God created Eve out of an apple, another who thinks Matthew was swallowed by a whale, most Americans cannot name more than five of the Ten Commandments, and more. Worst of all, there are not statistically significant discrepancies between religious groups. Evangelical Protestants do marginally better in surveys than Catholics, for example, but they are nearer to one another than they are to getting right. In some cases, evangelicals do even worse, as with the 60% of evangelicals who believe that Jesus was born in Jerusalem compared to only 51% of Jews. The real force of all these statistics is to re-sensitize the reader to the claim that the religious ignorance in America is no trifling matter. It is easy to say that we should know more about the faith claimed by some 80% of Americans; it is something else to come face-to-face with the cold, hard statistical reality of our own shortcomings.

Why is there a problem?

Unless you suffer under the delusion, as is the case with much of the institutional religious right, that the ongoing march of aggressive secularity is the cause of religious illiteracy, Prothero's answer to the question of "why" will not be shocking. The rise of widespread religious ignorance, especially Christian ignorance, is tied by Prothero to the American process of religious democratization, à la Nathan Hatch. It was the anti-institutional, anti-clerical, anti-intellectual impulse of distinctively American revivalism--particularly in the Second Great Awakening, but also, according to Prothero, in the post-war revival of the fifties--that began the deemphasizing of religious knowledge. The unlikely and unwitting alliance of liberal Protestantism and evangelicalism resulted in a subordination of religious knowledge to religious feeling and of orthodoxy to orthopraxy. The onus of responsibility and thus of guilt falls not the deliberate atheist but on the amnesiac Christian who has forgotten his or her duty for pedagogy.

Notably, in a justifiable effort to stop Christians from shirking their guilt in the rise of a the religiously ignorant, I believe Prothero goes to far in exonerating secularity as such. I agree, certainly, that the religious right's attempt to blame active and self-aware secular pressure is misguided, perhaps even destructive as it encourages Christians to continue to ignore their need to be the front line in resurrecting religious knowledge. It is worth remembering, however, that democratization--with its anti-institutionalism and anti-clericalism--is itself a secular impulse of Western culture. It is a more pernicious form of secularity in so far as it has been quietly accepted as if a religious truth and erodes religious knowledge, among other things, from within. In Prothero's defense, however, his work is perhaps not the place to make such a subtle argument.

How do we fix the problem?

Here, Prothero's proposal is as bold as it is unlikely. He insists that, as a civic duty, every high school student should take a mandatory course in the Bible and world religions. He reasons, quoting Warren Nord: "How can anyone believe that a collegebound student should take twelve years of mathematics and no religion rather than eleven years of mathematics and one year of religion Why require the study of trigonometry or calculus, which the great majority of students will never use or need, and ignore religion, a matter of profound and universal significance?" While some might suggest that having a course dedicated to the Bible is somehow giving preferential treatment to one religion, Prothero insists that having such a specialized course is a logical, educational, and civic necessity. Without commenting on the validity of any religion or religion at all, he correctly notes that the Bible--not the Vedas or the Tao Te Ching or even the Quran--has been the most influential work in the history of Western culture. It is the Bible and the Christian religion which dominate the American political and social landscape like nothing else. Those ignorant of Christianity in America are intellectually anemic in ways they would not be if similarly ignorant of Sikhism. In Prothero's own words:

Some have argued against Bible courses in the public schools on the grounds that they somehow “establish” Judeo-Christianity. For these courses to be fair, this argument goes, teachers need to give equal time to all the world’s scriptures, treating the Bible as one sacred text among many. This is absurd and impractical. Of course, students can learn much from reading the Quran and the Tao Te Ching. But the Bible, which the Supreme Court has described as “the world’s all-time best seller,” is of sufficient importance in Western civilization to merit its own course. Treating it no differently from, say, the Zend Avesta of the Zoroastrians or Scientology’s Dianetics makes no educational sense. (And what teacher has the hours—or the training—to give “equal time” to all the world’s scriptures?)

The most intriguing part of his proposal is his examination of its legality. Showing a surprisingly broad knowledge of legal decisions regarding religious curricula, Prothero helps the reader to navigate constitutional issues surrounding his proposal (which, I should note, is by no mean peculiar to him but is being taken up in various forms on all sides of the political spectrum). His conclusion, which one struggles to disagree with, "Supreme Court justices are all but begging public schools to teach about religion."

In short, Religious Literacy is an intriguing little work which marches us through the morass of our own benightedness and, perhaps overly optimistically, proposes a way out for Americans. While I struggle to imagine a world in which Prothero's national proposals become a reality, his work has forced me to think about what might be done on a more local level, particularly by parents and churches. Many of the hallmarks of literacy according to Prothero I did not learn until I began formal education in religion. Looking back, I realize that they are facts that all Christians should know, not the least of which those of us who come from religious traditions which purport to give special place to the Scriptures.

Sex Ed Gone Wild

The New York City public schools are introducing a new, salacious sex education curriculum which, though optional, is still rousing controversy. Why? Well we could start with the fact that, according to NBC, the co-ed classing include "role playing on how to resist sexual advances and on "negotiating condom use." What parents don't relish the idea of sending their son or daughter into the classroom to act out their first 'condom-use negotiation' in the presence of their peers? That appears to be only the tip of the iceberg. Outside of the classes, students have no less unsettling homework assignments: go to the store and take notes on important condom features like lubrication before you seek out a clinic that treats STDs and write out its confidentiality policy. It is important, after all, that students be prepared for when they get their first STD and need it treated without their parents finding out. The stated goal of the new curriculum, according to the deputy mayor, is "to help kids to delay the onset of sexual activity, and if they choose to engage in sexual activity, to do it in a healthy way" neglecting--by accidental oversight I assume--to add, "and if they don't do it in a healthy way, to get their crotch rot treated without mom finding out."

I certainly am not on the streets beating the drum for abstinence only education. After all, why should we expect a world full of non-Christians to accept the sexual morals of the church? Without faith as a moral compass, the motivation for avoiding premarital, adolescent intercourse is essentially non-existent. Frankly, speaking for those of us not so far removed from the heated, hormonal passions of youth, even faith provides only a paperthin preventative. Still, even as the sexual mores of society evolve such that an active, robust teen sexuality is becoming accepted, there are features of this curriculum which should give pause.

It seems to assume and affirm a kind of sexual libertinism. The guiding principle is "whatever you want is fine, provided you're doing it safely." Consider, for example, that they are giving flash cards to children as young as eleven to teach them the dangers of "intercourse using a condom and an oil-based lubricant, mutual masturbation, French kissing, oral sex and anal sex." Weren't you thinking about how to have safe anal sex at eleven? Me neither. If that weren't enough, the curriculum directs children to such resources as Columbia University's lascivious manifestation of Dear Abby called "Go Ask Alice!" Wonderfully open-minded Alice gives this advice to a homosexual teen:

Leading HIV research and care organizations, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC), say that the risk of being infected with HIV via receiving oral sex without a condom is virtually impossible.

Where your braces are concerned, if you are giving oral sex, proceed with caution: be gentle with partners and avoid sudden, erratic movements (both of you). If you decide not to take your partner's penis into your mouth, your lips, tongue, saliva, and breath can be wonderful sources of pleasure.

Admittedly, that unnerves me more than it might most, but surely most of us can find common ground when Alice reluctantly tells one seeker that sexual contact with an animal is probably wrong in practice but is normal to fantasize about. I confess that at the sexually vigorous age of twelve the concept of sex with other people was novel and mysterious enough. Sex with donkeys hadn't occurred to me. Then again, I didn't have Alice to plant the idea in my head that it was normal. I also didn't have her to help me learn how to massage my prostate, locate the clitoris, or give me a script for phone sex. Amusingly, the man with the prostate question was concerned that his question might be too kinky. He clearly didn't see the bestiality question or, for that matter, the poor coprophiliac who Alice had to disappoint by telling that eating feces, while not poisonous, increases the risk of disease. Lucky for him, its still okay to play with scat provided it is done safely.

That seems to be the theme here: whatever you do--eating feces, fantasizing about wombats, fellating unprotected with braces--is all good just so long as it is safe. The curriculum and the resources it recommends affirm no socio-sexual norms except safety. While I realize that safety needs to be the primary focus of sexual education, there is a distinction between "This is how to have sex without getting pregnant" and "This is how to sexually gratify yourself with your partners feces while minimizing the risk of disease." It introduces children to sexually aberrant (if I can be so judgmental of the woman who gets aroused by men who "adjust" themselves in public) to which they may not otherwise have been exposed and then tacitly approves their normalcy by only commenting on the safety of such behavior. It is precisely this philosophy which "abstinence only" proponents fear will create a society even more consciously enslaved to sexual libertinism. As a culture, it should cause us great alarm that anyone believes (perhaps correctly) that eleven year olds need to know the risks of mutual masturbation, twelve year olds the perils of anal sex, and high schoolers the best way to conceal their sexual activity from their parents. One can only hope that, if the public schools really are still public, public morality will prevail. Then again, maybe this is a sign that it has.

Sherlock Holmes: Parental Discretion Advised

A school in Jefferson's home county in Virginia is removing a Sir Arthur Conan Doyle work from its sixth grade curriculum, citing the book's religious intolerance as the motive:

The Victorian-era book, A Study In Scarlet, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was deemed inappropriate for the age group, but it will be available for older students.

The school board of Albermarle county, where Thomas Jefferson's Monticello home is located, took the action in response to a challenge from the parent of a middle school student...

"This is our young students' first inaccurate introduction to an American religion," Stevenson told the board, according to the newspaper.

It is interesting what we have decided is inappropriate for children. A federal court recently ruled in favor of the First Amendment rights of teenage girls to upload sexual images of themselves with total impunity. So, while Sherlock Holmes is too intolerant for sixth graders, this is appropriate behavior for 10th graders:

Prior to the first sleepover, the girls bought phallic-shaped rainbow colored lollipops. During the first sleepover, the girls took a number of photographs of themselves sucking on the lollipops. In one, three girls are pictured and M.K. added the caption "Wanna suck on my c**k." In another photograph, a fully-clothed M.K. is sucking on one lollipop while another lollipop is positioned between her legs and a fully-clothed T.V. is pretending to suck on it.

During another sleepover, T.V. took a picture of M.K. and another girl pretending to kiss each other. At a final slumber party, more pictures were taken with M.K. wearing lingerie and the other girls in pajamas. One of these pictures shows M.K. standing talking on the phone while another girl holds one of her legs up in the air, with T.V. holding a toy trident as if protruding from her crotch and pointing between M.K.'s legs. In another, T.V. is shown bent over with M.K. poking the trident between her buttocks. A third picture shows T.V. positioned behind another kneeling girl as if engaging in anal sex. In another picture, M.K. poses with money stuck into her lingerie -- stripper-style.

The pendulum is now officially swinging the other direction. At one point censorship was being driven by too conservative, too Puritanical values. Sexuality, atheism, social dissonance, and the like were inappropriate for our children. Now, our censorship is beginning to be driven by progressive values. It is the absences of pluralism or the perception of intolerance that are the issue. Surely there are others who realize that this is just two sides of the same coin; two equal and opposite ideologies embracing censorship to promote healthy development of "right-minded" people. At some point, it seems, all ideological systems will attempt to perpetuate themselves through the controlled flow of information to children. That is fine, perhaps entirely natural, but I do not want to hear a single progressive getting on my case about the religious "indoctrination" of children through Sunday school.

Taking a break from the absurd...sort of.

We interrupt this series on Christianity and the Absurd to bring you the response of Archbiship Rowan Williams, functional head of the Church of England, to the riots that recently took place in England. Specifially, I found this quote about education reform and its impact on society interesting:

Over the last two decades, our educational philosophy at every level has been more and more dominated by an instrumentalist model; less and less concerned with a building of virtue, character and citizenship – 'civic excellence' as we might say. And a good educational system in a healthy society is one that builds character, that builds virtue.

I find myself compelled to object that character formation is not the province of public schools but of homes. I submit that if we allow public institutions to teach our children virtue, we will find ourselves with children who only have institutional virtues. As a Christian, I consider "civic excellence" to be a secondary virtue to be understood in a radically different context than the government would. I certainly do not want to hand over the task of training up a virtuous society to world governments who have shown themselves incapable even of training up virtuous governments.

No thank you archbishop. Of all the things public education is doing wrong, I can assure you that it is not inappropriatley neglecting character formation.

Ron Paul on Education

It bears reiterating that I do not and will not endorse any candidate for political office because I do not believe that Christians should participate in civil government. I feel it necessary to restate that whenever I quote a politician approvingly on matters of public interest. In view of both my longstanding and more recent problems with the state of American education, I feel it is appropriate to once again quote from Ron Paul's Liberty Defined. He offers these interesting (if somewhat underdeveloped) thoughts on American education in America's recent history:

…up until the mid-twentieth century, education was the responsibility of the church, the family, and the local community. In the past sixty years especially, the federal government has become very much involved in financing and directing education at all levels. There is no evidence that quality of education has improved. There is evidence that more people go to college and that the cost has skyrocketed. At the grade school and high school levels, where local schools and parents have ever less control over the curriculum and administration of schools, there’s definitely been more violence, more drugs, and more dropouts associated with more centralized control.

Perhaps a return to a localized education system is our best hope as a society for properly educating future generations. Certainly I don't expect to achieve this at a national level as a formal institutional goal. Instead, it appears to be up to individual families to become frustrated with and ultimately abandon a disinterested, disconnected, and dysfunctional public education system.

Homosexuals in History

I first ran across this little tidbit of news in a series of news briefs on the side column of a USA Today and frankly was a little skeptical as to its accuracy. Since then, I have seen it numerous other places, enough to confirm its unsettling accuracy. California has apparently become the first state to mandate the study of the "contributions of gays and lesbians" to history. Aside from the more obvious and natural outrage over the government mandating social acceptance through indoctrination (which strengthens my resolve to keep whatever children I may someday have out of the public school system), I have a number of more reasoned objections to the idea of teaching homosexual history that should be shared even by the more socially liberal among us.

1. Curriculum reform cannot stop bullying.

It is shocking to see how heavily the above linked article hammers home the idea that this agenda is being pursued in an effort to stop the social ostracism and bullying of homosexual students in schools. One is left to wonder whether liberal lawmakers are being deliberately deceptive or are in fact really so deluded as to believe that curriculum reform will fundamentally alter social dynamics among adolescents. The idea is ludicrous and defies every ounce of human experience. After all, history textbooks are littered with the contributions of studious intellectuals, and yet we find that nerds are still bullied with startling regularity in schools. Certainly the presence of Grover Cleveland and Howard Taft in the lectures has never stopped fat kids from being disproportionately targeted in dodge ball. It as if lawmakers reason that if they could only teach teenagers about some obscure but influential figure with acne that no child would ever be called "pizza face" again.

Perhaps they are just unwilling to admit that pubescence is to some degree inevitably nasty, brutish, and short. That is not to say that bullying is somehow a fact of life that should be accepted, only that it cannot be corrected by subliminal positive messages about people like the objects of bullying. Appeals to the better nature of teenagers through positive education rejects the fundamental reality that people--and particularly adolescents in our society--are raised to understand reality in terms of in-groups to be protected and outsiders to be suppressed. If you want to stop bullying so radical that it has suicide as an occasional consequence, the answer is stricter discipline (or, heaven forbid, better moral education from parents) not subtle marketing ploys. (Curiously, other socially marginal groups with less political currency have been committing suicide in quiet obscurity for decades. I must have missed the push for legislation to protect those students.)

2. Homosexuals, as such, contribute almost nothing to history. Neither do women or blacks.

As incendiary as that statements sounds, the truth of it is all but incontrovertible and can be extended even to men and whites. These incidental features of human existence rarely assert themselves particularly on the face of history because the importance of historical events are rarely so minutely conditioned. In other words, it is not homosexuals, blacks, women, men, whites, or septuagenarian vegetarians who make history. It is people.

What the study of "minority" history ultimately aims to do, and what frustrates me as a historian much in the way that the moral implication frustrate me as a Christian, is to impute artificial importance to an irrelevant characteristic. If Obama had been the most successful president in history, it would not have been because he was black and frankly it would be insulting to make that kind of causal connection, but that is precisely what minority history attempts to do. It says, "Look Marie Curie discovered radiation and won two Nobel Prizes. Also, she was a woman." It isn't as though being a woman has anything to do with Marie Curie's historical importance. The fact of her chromosomal structure is incidental to her importance in the history of modern science.

It would be and is different when the aspect in question is relevant to someone's historical importance. Martin Luther King Jr. is important because of his work as a black man in the black community advocating for black rights. His skin color is relevant to his historical contribution. But, if Alexander the Great was gay (as he is so often supposed to have been), what precisely does that have to do with his conquering the known world?

3. Gay is in the eye of the beholder.

Alexander the Great makes a nice transitional figure to speak of yet another pertinent objection. Unlike race and sex, which are apparent, the question of sexuality is often the product of imaginative reconstructions by historians. Was Alexander gay? Was Shakespeare? Was Socrates or Plato? (After all, if contemporary practice is any indicator, it is possible that Socrates had non-penetrative sex with his adolescent pupil. Is that nugget from the history of homosexuality fitting for our middle school classrooms?) It is really anyone's guess, and scholars have taken that license as a free pass to make assumptions about any historical figure's sexuality. Just how prominent homosexuality and its practitioners becomes in history is entirely at the discretion of the textbook writers. They will arbitrate in an evidentiary void the sexuality of history's greatest figures with the result that we may all live to see the day when our textbooks are adorned with an orgiastic image of the founding fathers exercising the inalienable rights endowed on them by their creator.

4. Sexuality is not the measure of historical importance.

Finally, mandating homosexual history imposes an artificial standard for what merits historical importance. No one is contending that there is some great, overlooked aspect of history relevant to the kind of general studies pursued in grade school. The important contours of history which constitute the historical grounding of a liberal education are not being neglected. Children prior to this law were (in theory at least) able to graduate high school with a basic understanding of the history of Western civilization in general, the rise of the American nation in particular, and the generally inscrutable means by which our government functions (when it feels inclined to function).

By insisting on the inclusion of homosexual figures in the history texts who would not have been otherwise included, lawmakers have essentially dictated for historians what constitutes historical importance. It is no longer enough to be a person of sufficient historical impact as to merit the attention of young minds. If one did not rub genitals with the appropriate members of the same sex, such a person is likely not to make the cut of a rubric of relevance that weighs sexuality no less than influence or innovation. Certainly legislators are not allotting extra time and resources for the study of homosexual history; inevitably something presently being discussed because of its independent historical worth must be cut. The ultimate result is an educationally impoverished generation of thinkers in a time when this country can hardly afford any more blows to their collective academic worth.

Laws like this are shocking for their political rather than educational character. As legislators and special interests groups with a social agenda are rejoicing, students are slowly being acculturated to a warped society. With this accusation, I do not even have in mind particularly the idea that homosexual behavior is morally incorrect. My problem is here more the indoctrination with fundamentally distorted views of history: a false causal link between homosexuality and historical import, a skewed representation of the historical importance of homosexual events relative to the scope of history, a revised history of human sexuality, and a false sense of hope that education can solve the cruel realities of life, especially adolescence. I am less concerned with raising up a generation of homosexuals than I am of creating a generation of ignorant, self-deluded social authoritarians...like the ones in the California state government. The latter is a more fundamental corruption of human character than the former.

A Call to Arms

Graduate education is a form of spiritual warfare, an immense and immensely violent striving for recognition from one’s superiors, distinctions from one’s peers, and foundationally and ultimately formal qualification. It instills in the student a take no prisoners mentality because of the unremitting totality of the enterprise. To succeed is to lay hold of a great and elusive prize that is a permanent tangible reminder of the student’s value; to fail is to have inadequacy as a permanent brand on one’s self-image. The academy’s expectations pale in comparison to the professor’s expectations, and these in turn melt away beneath the weight of the expectations that students impute to both. It all amounts to a goal which is so apparently unattainable that it cries out to be sought with militaristic determination, in the unrepentant, unyielding haze of bloodlust.

The real of trick of the enemy, however, is to convince students that they are one another’s enemies on the academic battlefield. Thus, the student seeks to whet the scholarly appetite at the throat of his or her peers, and disputation is the native language learned in academic infancy. Curiosity is thinly veiled reconnaissance in which the competition is sized up, their shortcomings noted in a tactical ledger for future reference. Debate is a form of guerilla warfare where the student attacks mercilessly at the first sign of weakness and retreats again at the first glimmer of strength. These “mock” battles are rehearsed in private and acted out on grander and grander scales before professors as if by players on a stage. At the end, all eyes turn longingly to the judgment seat for some indication of who might have emerged victorious from the day’s fray.

But professors and the institutions they represent are neither a theater audience nor great adjudicators. They are lone watchmen standing before the gateway to student aspirations. What they lack in force of numbers they make up for in cunning, allowing or encouraging the deceit that students are at war among themselves. They placidly watch as students beat each other into weariness and then beg to have the prize handed to them, all the while delighting in the secret irony that the truly gifted students would realize that they have the collective power to storm the gate and take their prize by force.

A more reflective, more self-aware student body would spend less time emulating a knightly tournament and more time laying siege to academia, the stone keep with its rich storehouse of prestige and vocational security. Clarity of vision, mutual forbearance, and the combined force of a phalanx of intellects fresher and more virile than those who would oppose them, these would characterize the struggle for the unattainable goal. Then when the fortress had been razed and its keepers inevitably brushed aside, the new academy, perhaps even a stronger academy, could be constructed inviting a new, perhaps stronger, generation of students to storm its walls and take what is theirs by right of force and determination.

Raising Leaders by Lowering Standards

Here is some exciting news in the world of education. Harding University is proud to announce that if you are not up-to-snuff academically, you have nothing to fear. They will just make classes easier. In an effort to combat the plummeting test scores on general Bible exams, the university has decided to take what had previously been two classes (Old Testament and New Testament) and divide them up into four, slower-paced survey courses. Now you can spend twice as much time to learn the same amount of information, proving as usual that education on every level is habitually tailored to the needs of the lowest common denominator.