At one level, my last article was my tribute to Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young singing Teach Your Children. However, it didn’t address what we teach or learn. So, the song is a hopeful melody, but the haunting question still exists about the content of what we teach. I have taught history classes for years, and we haven’t taught actual and ethical history.

We still teach an incorrect history out of ignorance, or we intentionally lie about our history. Here are a handful of examples. White Europeans founded America. It was the City Upon a Hill, according to John Winthrop. In 1630, he delivered a sermon about the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony.

A City on a Hill

Roger Williams was expelled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony five years after Winthrop had preached about the City on the Hill. Williams founded the Rhode Island Colony, which gave the colonists religious freedom. Not everyone bought into Winthrop's mindset.

Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence a century and a half later. Every child in elementary school knows this sentence from the Declaration of Independence. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal....” That statement was both racist and sexist. However, Jefferson lived in Virginia, and the other Southern States had slaves.

A century later, America fought the Civil War over that issue. After nearly 700,000 deaths during the war, the North won the war and lost the peace. The Civil War raised the issue for some white Americans to begin to grasp the reality of racism. A century later, in the early 1960s, some white Americans became involved in the civil rights movement. On the other hand, blacks have understood racism since 1619 in North America. That is a learning gap for whites.

Today, Trump and his white MAGA minions want to remove the term diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). DEI is the concept that all societies should deal with all groups regardless of race and ethnic background, along with gender equality.

Therefore, we must be aware of what we teach our children. White males are not superior to women and all the others who aren’t white, regardless of their sex.

All human beings emerged from Africa. Only Homo sapiens spread out of Africa and survived. Homo neanderthalensis and erectus also left Africa. They either mingled with each other or died off. The only trace of the last Neanderthals died off around 40,000 years ago. However, many descendants of European backgrounds have small traces of Neanderthal DNA.

Human history

Trump has issues with blacks, but Hispanics and Muslims are on his list of people who he doesn’t value.

We need to teach our children, and they need to teach us. However, in both cases, we must remember what we teach and learn.

This is an excellent video about A River Runs Through It.

This is also from the movie. It deals with the tension between learning and teaching.