When I was very young I learned the “wise saying” that admonishes “Better to be silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt”. In the age of social media, some people just can’t shut up.
Over Fourth of July, at least 30 people put on Twitter messages to the effect: “Happy Birthday America! I can’t believe you’re 2,013 years old!” (link). Oh wow!
I realize I’m not typical, in that I actually LIKE history and study it on purpose, but how does anyone get to be in high school or college, as I’m assuming most of these 30 people are, without “1776” ever registering in their consciousness? Just reading the holiday sales ads should get you that far.
There’s a lot that could be said about the shortcomings of our educational system in failing to educate people with the most basic information about the country in which they were born, but there may actually be a bigger contributory problem.
Most of us understand that 2013 is the number of years back to when our calendar says Jesus Christ was born. It’s not quite right of course, we now know, but that’s how the dating started. However, Academia has mounted a largely successful, concerted effort to change “B.C.” and “A.D.” to “B.C.E” (Before the Common Era) and “C.E.” (the Common Era). So in schools today, the student never asks, “What does ‘BC’ mean?” and never hears “Before Christ”.
The notion of time being split by the greatest event in history – the appearance of the Son of God in human form – is earth-shaking in its audacity, but even more so because virtually the whole world accepted it for centuries.
“The Common Era”, on the other hand, sounds like an arbitrary division that came out of a university teachers lounge so history professors wouldn’t have to count so high it involved math.
