The other day Nancy and I spent a lot of time at Logos for grandparents day. The kids had their projects out, we saw some impressive class exercises, and so on. My grandson Knox had an impressive statement about the Reformation, at a sixth grade level, along with a poem he had written about Luther.
As a result I got to thinking about history, and how we teach it to kids. Moreover, I was interested in how God made the world, such that all the first history lessons must be taught to kids, and must be taught at a kid level — that is to say, without the nuance that you get later on in your grad studies.
But here is the thing. I think a lot of people don’t understand this rightly, not grasping the fact that this is a design feature, and that there is nothing whatever that can be done to get rid of it. We should seek to use it, and labor hard not to abuse it — but trying to erase it is abusing it.
Think of it this way. God wants the base coat of this painting to be pretty simple. God wants us to teach our children that Luther was good and the pope wasn’t. Is that the whole story? Of course not. But it is the right way to tell the story. You start at the beginning, when the hats are white and the other hats are black. Later on, you learn other stuff, and how you learn the other stuff makes all the difference.
Many students of history, coming to adulthood, come also to the conclusion that the broad, thick lines that drew their first picture of history were “lies” because they didn’t take the broader subtleties into account. But how could they? Either we teach no history at all to children, or we do it simplistically. This is how it is supposed to be.
Now if what a child learns is the reverse of the truth instead of a simpler version of it, that means that an overhaul later on is appropriate and necessary. But an overhaul is not necessary because a child learned some historical sound bytes about the American War for Independence or the Reformation.
I was talking to my son Nate about this afterward, and he compared it to looking at a cumulus cloud from a distance on a sunny day. The lines between cloud and blue sky are crisp and clean, and telling the difference between cloud and sky is the easiest thing in the world. But if you were to fly right by the cloud, you would see that the boundary between cloud and sky is not nearly so crisp and clean. This is not relativism, but it is perspectivalism.