On yesterday’s Trumpet Daily Radio Show, Stephen Flurry spoke about how American education is discarding history. Our high schools and colleges teach less and less of it, and what they do teach is usually distorted to suit present moral sensibilities and political agendas.
Why is this such a problem?
Think of senility. When a man loses his memory, he loses everything. He is disoriented; he can easily be led astray. His personality and character erode. As anyone who has witnessed it knows, it is one of the most heartbreaking tragedies possible in a human life.
The same is true of societies. The memory of a society is its history. Lose that, and you lose everything. With no common remembered past, a society has no common sense of purpose,
direction, moral orientation, belonging, being. It is not a community participating in a shared story but a constellation of individuals traveling different paths.
Ignoring history doesn’t erase its effect on us; our lives are shaped, blessed and cursed by it in countless ways. But when our society becomes senile, we don’t know history and we don’t know that we don’t know it!
