Adding Diversity or Enforced Amnesia?
By Becky Aniol
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It’s all part of the game. They’re messing with our memories–and they’re doing it on purpose. If we enter the game, our memories will be erased. Our culture will disappear. We will forget who we are.
This sounds rather dystopian—not something we’d run toward but something we’d run from. And yet, we’ve willingly entered the game. Our memories are being erased. Our culture is disappearing. They’re doing it on purpose . . . and we’re letting them. We’re inviting the game-keepers into our homes and our homeschools. And, in an ironic turn, we’re inviting them in because our memories have already been erased and our culture is already disappearing. In a sick parody of The Scream, we may indeed look in the mirror, but we’ve forgotten what we are supposed to look like.
We are products of enforced amnesia, and its game of erasure and destabilization has come to a homeschool curriculum near you.
When a homeschool curriculum makes changes to “add diversity” or “expand the canon” and removes or replaces books that might be “offensive” to BIPOC people groups, this is not an “empathy” chess move or an “awareness” play. There’s a deeper game afoot. In Carl Trueman’s seminal work on The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, he diagnoses the problem in education thus:
“The game is to abolish boundaries and canons entirely—presumably as constructs of various previous imperialism, cultural, sexual, and otherwise. The purpose is the destabilization of the discipline [history, literature, art, etc.], and this all serves to institutionalize the cultural amnesia that is part of our third-world agriculture” (333). He continues, “The transformation of the humanities into disciplines by which the past is not so much examined as a source of wisdom but rejected as a tale of oppression is key to this anticultural impulse. . . . Cultural amnesia is the order of the day, a political imperative, a fundamental aspect of the social imaginary” (337).
In this game, adding diverse books and diverse authors and diverse topics “is not . . . merely supplementing the lacunae . . . ; its intention is rather to destabilize the received narratives of the past and the alleged power structures in the present that depend on them” (Trueman 335, emphasis added).
In other words, this is not merely a matter of adding diversity; to supplement is not good enough per the rules of this game. We must also discard classic books and turn up our noses at them. And the purpose of the game of “read this not that” (not read this also) is destabilization of the received narrative that has been passed to us through the generations. They want to rewrite the story. Forget truth.
This is the complete opposite of C. S. Lewis’s prescription for modern education in Abolition of Man, in which he argues that the entire purpose of education is the passing on of the Tradition of Truth, which is universal and exists outside of the self, to rightly order the affections.
The only way we can possibly know ourselves and love others rightly is if we have received Truth from the past. But what does he know? He is a dead, white, Western, heterosexual male.
Amnesia. Destabilization. We are lost in a forest of white guilt and political correctness. Abandon all hope, ye who willingly—or unwittingly—enter here.
We must not enter the game. We must keep our wits, our memories, our hope. We must preserve the Tradition of Truth for the next generation and, like Virgil, guide our children out of the dark forest of self-affirmation to a path of study that points them away from themselves and people like themselves and to the sovereign Creator God. For, as Trueman reminds us, “the purpose of . . . study is not ultimately the affirmation of the self of the student; rather, it is the transformation of the self of the student through engagement with something external to her that makes demands of her” (333). If we point our students toward transformation rather than self-reflection and self-affirmation, they will remember what they’re supposed to look like. Not like other people like themselves, not the best version of themselves or the non-oppressed version of themselves—but like Christ, who “emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant,
. . . becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”
Jon Harris has discussed this same thing in relation to our calendar and holidays. As the left adds more and more days to recognize certain ideologies and people in the name of diversity, it's inevitable that others, more central to our nation's founding and virtues, will be pushed off the back of the wagon so to speak, as there simply isn't room for every single one of them on our calendars, in our culture, and in our hearts.
I came across a Danish/Caribbean artist, Jeanette Ehlers that touches on this erasure of history. Europe has always been ahead of the States in terms of progressive agenda so I thought this really interesting. Her art tries to bridge and make aware Denmark's deep connection with the slave trade and the Danish West Indies. Her frustration through the past couple of decades is that there is no mention of the Danish West Indies or Danish roots in slavery in modern Danish education. She had no clue of her real roots as she calls them, and her work is to bring attention to this part of Danish history that she says has been white-washed and erased. It's really fascinating especially since she is a woman of color and wants this history known and acknowledged. She has a whole series on what it means to be erased literally from photographs with only shadows of the people erased still present. I am sure in the coming generations we're going to see young people feeling the same frustration that important portions of our history are being erased along with the lives that lived through those years. Her mini-doc is on Youtube...it's worth watching.