Texas Social Standards and Sojourners Magazine

We have a short opinion piece in the May 2010 issue of Sojourners magazine. You can check it out at the Sojourners website, but here is a taste:

But what bothers me most is the failure of the Texas Board to understand the place of history in the school curriculum. History is not about who’s “in” or “out.” It is, rather, a discipline that has the power to transform the lives of students by teaching them virtues essential to the kind of human flourishing and civic responsibility that the United States desperately needs. Students should encounter the American past in all its fullness. They need to learn about heroic figures, as well as historical actors with whom they might disagree. Such encounters, when led by a good history educator, teach children empathy and civility for people and ideas that they find to be different or strange.

History teaches us that we are part of something larger than ourselves—a community made up of all kinds of people with all kinds of beliefs. A Christian might say that such a community is filled with human beings who have inherent dignity and worth because they were created in God’s image. Diverse expressions of the human experience should thus find their way into the stories we tell about the past. This is not “political correctness”; it is good history. And, I might add, good theology.