Former Osage Principal Chief Jim Gray and his wife Olivia Gray (Osage) recently took to Facebook to condemn their daughter’s world history assignment inquiring about the world’s beginning.
On the assignment sheet, students were asked to answer the overall research question about how the world began. Students were also asked to ponder the following questions:
How did the world start?
Who started it?
When did evil start or did it always exist?
Are people inherently good or evil or neither?
What is morality?
What is religion?
What is Christianity?
What does it mean to be a Christian?
Is God real?
Is Satan real?
Exactly one of those bullet points has anything to do with history, and a second is barely relevant
This teacher isn’t just proselytizing and forcing religious instruction; but is horrible at their job.
How did the world start? Well, that depends on how, exactly, you define "the world", doesn't it?
If you mean Earth as a planet, it started thanks to gravity pulling together a collection of dust and gas orbiting the early sun through a process called "accretion".
Animals have no concept of "morality" so good and evil didn't exist until humans invented them. Sumerian cuneiform records early religious rites from 4,000 BC, but the concepts of "good" and "evil" like fire and the wheel pre-date written language and cannot be precisely dated.
Human beings are born as blank slates with no prior knowledge of good, evil, or anything else. All that is learned behavior. They are inherently neither.
Gray said since she made the Facebook post, Nettie’s world history teacher Erich Richter, who is a non-certified classroom adjust teacher, took down the assignment.
I used to listen to the Educate podcast (still subscribed if they resume publishing). They did a segment on new teachers and the views of some of the enrolling high school teachers made me feel despair. This is what the hollowing-out of our public education system yields. Fight for teachers and public education or nutjobs like this might be teaching your kids.