Your “Shabby Little Office” and Mine

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As I thought about what to write to you today, I remembered a couple of news tidbits Ray shared with me recently. Here they are:

Tidbit 1

During a recent protest on a college campus, a student speaker mentioned that Abraham Lincoln owned slaves.

Yikes! Absolutely not! “What are ‘they’ teaching these kids?” Abraham Lincoln did not own slaves!

Tidbit 2

The Careers Services office at the University of Exeter in England recently sent out an email to staff and students. The purpose was to inspire them to greater effort. The email included this quote:

“One cannot permit unique opportunities to slip by for the sake of trifles.” — Erwin Rommel

The problem is that Erwin Rommel was a high ranking Nazi official under Adolf Hitler. The university expressed deep apologies. Officials explained that the staff member who selected the quote did not know who Rommel was. They said he picked the quote from a “random quote generator.” That’s a major oops, especially in a country whose population suffered so terribly at the hands of the Nazis during World War II.

With those tidbits in mind, I contemplated writing a post about how essential it is to know history. As I pondered how to begin, I checked my email. To my dismay, I saw a timely email from Time magazine (no pun intended). It reported a proposal from the College Board. They are suggesting that the Advanced Placement World History curriculum quit starting at the beginning of time, as it has until now. They suggest the curriculum begin at 1450.

I appreciate efforts for STEM education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. I also appreciate efforts for STEAM education, which includes all of the above, plus the arts. However, two of my personal educational passions are for more Bible and history education. The news tidbits above illustrate the need for better history education. Earlier this year I read the following in a newsletter from Senator Lamar Alexander, one of our U.S. Senators from Tennessee:

Our children’s worst grades are not in math and science, but in United States History. We need to teach more U.S. History so our children grow up knowing what it means to be an American.

I would add that we need to teach U.S. History in a way that children enjoy. Anyone who loves a good story can love history. Too often, it’s been history education that has taken the story out of it and made it “a misery.” “A misery” — that is how my mama used to describe nagging pain. It could be applied aptly to a lot of history instruction.

We need to teach World History creatively, too. And we need to start way before 1450 — all the way back at the beginning of time.

The world we live in every day illustrates the need for better Bible education. Thinking about what happens to us and our children after we live in this world everyday illustrates it even better.

The Epiphany Episcopal Church at the Mississippi Agriculture and Forestry Museum, a living-history museum in Jackson. Courtesy of Photographs in the Ben May Charitable Trust Collection of Mississippi Photographs in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

No amount of STEM or STEAM education matters, if we don’t know what people in the past have done with STEAM, what people should do with what they learn in STEAM, and most importantly, what God says about what we do with STEAM.

One of the reasons it is wise for the young to respect the aged is that the aged have more history — along with history’s lessons — than the young people do. Without respect for the aged, the young are unlikely to learn those history lessons.

You shall rise up before the grayheaded
and honor the aged,
and you shall revere your God; I am the Lord.
Leviticus 19:32

Laura Ingalls Wilder began to write her Little House books when she was about my age. She was passionate about getting her stories down on paper so that young people would know those stories.

I am convinced that one reason God has enabled the homeschool movement to thrive is so that in the future there will be some people who know history. I believe that another reason God has raised up a throng of homeschooled young people is that many will also know God’s Word.

In It’s A Wonderful Life, George’s father Peter Bailey says this about his life’s work at the Building and Loan: “You know, George, I feel that we are doing something important. Satisfying a fundamental urge. It’s deep in the race for a man to want his own roof and walls and fireplace, and we’re helping him get those things in our shabby little office.”

I am passionate about writing down history for children and teenagers. By God’s grace, you and I are also doing something important in our “shabby little offices” and schoolrooms and on our kitchen tables and, if we’re wise, out in the wide, wide world.

In the Bible, God reminds His people again and again what He has done for them and their people in the past. In 1 Corinthians 10, Paul writes about people in the past who did wrong. He tells the Christians at Corinth why their stories were written down:

Now these things happened to them as an example,
and they were written for our instruction,
upon whom the ends of the ages have come.
1 Corinthians 10:11

 

 

 

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