Nikole Hannah-Jones, 1619 Project creator and professor, said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that parents should not be in charge of deciding what is taught in schools.
Hannah-Jones said, “I don’t really understand this idea that parents should decide what’s being taught. I’m not a professional educator. I don’t have a degree in social studies or science. We send our children to school because we want them to be taught by people who have expertise in the subject area. And that is not my job.”
Referencing former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, Hannah-Jones said, “When the governor or the candidate said he didn’t think parents should be deciding what’s being taught in school, he was panned for that, but that’s just the facts.”
“This is why we send our children to school and don’t homeschool, because these are the professional educators who have the expertise to teach social studies, to teach history, to teach science, to teach literature. I think we should leave that to the educators. Yes, we should have some say, but school is not about simply confirming our worldview. Schools should teach us to question. They should teach us how to think, not what to think.”
HD Editor’s Note: Why Is This News Biblically Relevant?
Ken Ham, of Answers in Genesis, recently wrote about the false assertion that parents are not the main authority over their children. As Ham explains, no matter what the Government may claim, the responsibility and authority over children is given by God to parents:
“Who ‘owns’ the children—parents or the government?” Ham wrote. “In our day and age, many involved in western government believe it’s the government that owns kids. Many believe they know what is best for children and think they should get to dictate what children learn—and parents are just in the way of accomplishing the state’s goals. And that shouldn’t surprise us because how you answer the question of ‘Who owns the children?’ depends on your starting point and the worldview you build that’s based on that starting point.”
“If you reject God and his Word, then anything goes,” he insisted, “there’s no absolute standard on which to base your thinking. In this view, children are just biological machines, the product of millions of years of evolution. They aren’t given to parents—they are just a ‘choice’ parents made.”
“But when we start with God’s Word, we learn that children are a gift from God—given to parents. He has given parents authority over their children and the responsibility of training, teaching, and raising children. They are not just “choices,” nor are they the government’s responsibility—children are parent’s responsibility because God gave children to their parents to train them up for him,” he asserted.
It is important to understand that the effort to exchange Biblical teaching for overtly secular education in the classrooms has had a detrimental effect on how children view the topic of racism.
The Bible teaches that “from one man [God] made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands” (Act 17:26). In other words, every human being is created in the image of God, starting from the same man (Adam). We are all therefore one race, one family, and equal one to another (Genesis 1:27).
This runs in stark contrast to the teaching of the father of evolution, Charles Darwin, who suggested that some ethnicities are further on the evolutionary track than others.
It is also solely through anti-Biblical teaching that the idea can be espoused that skin color determines whether a person is inherently racist or a victim of racism.
The Bible states that there “is no respect of persons with God” (Romans 2:11). Furthermore, 1 Samuel 16:7 says that the Lord does not see people as man does “for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart” and Jesus encourages us to do the same (John 7:24).
