Legislating history?

Another instance of involving legislators beyond their arena of responsibility and expertise.  Here the issue, or potential issue, is the context of public school text books.  (Does this sound familiar?)  Rather than legislating science, some Tea Party activists in Tennessee propose legislating history.  SEE STORY  They want to insure that the nation's founders are portrayed in an entirely positive light, as the sort of heros no one really is.  Rather than obscure or conceal the fact that Jefferson, for example, owned slaves, might we do better to wrestle with the reasons a man who articulated high principles was unable to live up to them personally and participated in collective political decisions that undermined those principles?

History can not teach us, we must learn from it, learn from it and our fore bearers as they really were, not as we wish they had been.  Americans need to learn how to face the tragedies of our past (distant and recent), not hide them in a false story.  I've been reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer lately so this brief sentence from Life Together came to mind: "By sheer grace, God will not permit us to live even for a brief period in a dream world."  

One more point: the job of legislators is to craft laws that help us move toward the future, not to remake the past.