History is a class that is taught based upon facts. Circumstances that have actually happened, whether written, recorded, or heard, moments in time are important to our future. Without being able to learn from our past, especially if they are mistakes of mankind, how are we to ever better our future? In Indiana, the House of Representatives passed a bill that takes away the ability for students to be freely taught by their teachers lessons based around racism.

As a student who has taken AP US History, I’ve learned, from what I can say confidently is a completely unbiased opinion, the trials and tribulations of the terrible era of slavery. We also were taught the insanities of the Holocaust. Within Bill 1134, it wants to give students the choice to eradicate this valuable lesson from their curriculum. I disagree with this choice gravely because being educated on a topic is the only way to gain as much knowledge as possible and understand the aspect of humanity. No one is born racist, but by being given the option to never learn properly about our past, one could develop uneducated opinions and spread more inherent racism- thus not fixing any problems.

According to the website Chalkbeat, by giving parents the option to opt out for their kids in lessons they think may not be beneficial for their psyche, it will provide reassurance within one’s heart. Personally, an opt out system to me sounds like an abuse of power just waiting to happen. With opting out, one does not need to learn a replacement section and can just cruise through this part of the class. Why then would any student want to put in the effort when he can just have a free A+? By giving kids the ability to avoid topics, whether it emotionally affects them or not, guaranteed most of them would ditch the history books and take the extra study hall. This only furthers the disruption of solving racism and creates an opening for bad opinions to flood in.

Upon the intrusion of this Bill, history teachers will also be forced to provide a day by day outlook of their teachings to parents. This is not necessarily a bad idea to me, but it does put a lot of extra pressure on the working men and women to not cause any problems with any individual. Along with that, why would every teacher need to be challenged and punished in a sense by this new idea when there were only a few bad apples to have taught history wrong in the first place? I understand that in the concept of school, when one person does something bad everyone must be shown that he cannot make the same mistake; however, by completely eliminating an important part of every child’s curriculum is not the answer to the teachers who are doing it wrong. I believe that something should be done before this extreme.

In the event of this actually happening, I do not know how history will be taught honestly ever again. There will be gaps and crevices where information does not fit in correctly for the students who learn information without the big picture. It will be an exact scene from George Orwell’s novel 1984 where history is rewritten constantly to accommodate what the present wants it to be, instead of the truth it once was. By taking away the knowledge of the carnage in the past, how is one to ever make the correct choices in the future? With the Bill on the way to the Senate, one can only hope it will be revised, and made better for the public, and our future.