Maya Angelou said, “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”
And it takes courage to study and try to understand history. I heard a West Virginia school teacher say at a public hearing just this week that where one’s comfort level ends is where real learning begins.
The American story, like the history of every other country, is complicated. We have been both the shining city on the hill and the source of great injustices. An individual’s core beliefs and life experiences determine which of those stories is theirs.
I believe both versions are true and relevant, but I also believe that the founding principles provide for this country to eventually get it right. As Dr. Martin Luther King said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
This country’s arc is long as well. The more time that passes, the greater responsibility we have to try to understand what has gone before so we can build on the righteous and correct the failures.
For most of us, the introduction to American history comes from our public school teachers. They face the immense challenge of, in just a few years, teaching us about our country’s past. The enormous scope of that assignment means, at best, the course work is preliminary.
Still, these are formative moments, particularly on difficult subjects. For example, students may first learn about the concepts of freedom, democracy and the liberty guaranteed in the Constitution. However, those lessons become more complicated when the facts about slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, women’s rights, Japanese internment, and other controversial issues are introduced.
Teachers must have the latitude to help students better understand the often conflicting stories of America. Unfortunately, a bill on the verge of passing in the West Virginia Legislature will make the task of those teachers even more difficult.
SB 498, “The Anti-Racism Act,” is the Republican response to the fear that West Virginia public school children will be taught Critical Race Theory. Bill supporters view CRT as a mechanism to indoctrinate students to the idea that every aspect of our culture must be viewed through a racial prism and that the country’s institutions are inherently racist.
There have been just enough CRT controversies around the country, including neighboring Virginia, to inspire legislators to make a preemptive strike against it here. But crafting a law on what can and cannot be taught is like trying to define pornography.
Rather than restricting how teachers teach history or current events, we should give them even more latitude and support. If a teacher goes too far, the parents will hear about it, and so will the local board of education. That is how these issues are resolved all the time.
SB 498, if it becomes law, will cause teachers to limit frank classroom discussions about controversial subjects or perhaps even skip over seminal events in our country’s history to not run afoul of the law.
How do we expect to create a better future if we are going to make it more difficult to speak honestly about the past?
