Memory is a funny thing. Like photos that yellow or fade with age, memory is not some fixed immutable thing. This is true of our individual memories as well as our collective memories as a society or group. Maybe this is why Solomon cautioned, “Say not, ‘Why were the former days better than these?’ for it is not from wisdom that you ask this” (Ecclesiastes 7:10).

A human tendency when displeased with the present to pine for the past. To idealize a bygone era as though things were so much better then. I hear this expressed in numerous ways. It sounds like appeals by Evangelicals to a bygone day when America was a Christian nation, or the romanticizing of the pre-Civil War South by The United Daughters of the Confederacy, or a recent successful political campaign slogan with a red background.

We are all inescapably situated in time, and necessarily adopt a posture toward it. As I reflect on the overall story arch of Scripture, I am struck by how profoundly forward-facing it is. Hope is situated firmly in the future. Yes, we are to practice remembering the past, to be regularly reminded of the faithful acts of God and learn from the good and bad examples of others before us. But we remember accurately. And the Bible lives up to its ethics by the ruthless honesty that it takes when narrating the past. It is also quite clear: pining for the past, that is foolishness.

I think a concrete example could be helpful here. Do you remember Almonzo from Farmer Boy? Like all good-white-Evangelical-home-school-girls, I was raised on Laura Ingalls Wilder’s historical narrative, so let me provide a quick refresher. As the book opens, Almonzo is trudging through the snow with his siblings to their one room school house, back in the good ol’ days.

Bill Ritchie and several other older adolescent students terrorized the local school. They successfully ran off teachers year after year with their violence, and had injured the previous school master so severely that he later died of the injuries. Both Bill and his dad publicly bragged of his ability to abuse teachers and disrupt the school. Community leaders were passive to address the unchecked violence, even after a man had died. The school board saw their only duty as informing the dead teacher’s replacement of the risks of the job.

Mr. Course the new teacher borrowed a lethal blacksnake cattle whip from Almonzo’s dad. To establish his authority in the classroom he whipped Bill Ritchie with it repeatedly in front of the entire school until he was a bloody, blubbering mess. At which point he pushed him out the door and started in on the next teen in line until the remaining bullies started scrambling out the window and running from the school.

That community was so impotent in the face of belligerent violence that the best solution they could come up with (between the educator and one of the respectable invested parents) was for a whole group of children to be traumatized by a public flogging in their school house. That’s how they solved the problem.

Back in the good ol’ days when children knew how to respect adults.

So, the next time you hear someone bemoaning our current schools in comparison to some idyllic past, don’t fall for it. Lift your shoulders, straighten your back, take a deep breath, look forward in hope, and maybe even be part of the solution by calling your local public school and offering to volunteer.