Rewriting history to support our beliefs
Let us assume that you wanted to write a book about the history of the United States.
How would you go about it? Would you conduct years of research into how our country came into existence and to grow, and each major event that molded us into what we are? Would you be painstaking to record everything as accurately and objectively as possible, and to avoid injecting your biases and prejudices into your writing? Or, would you write it in the way that you would have liked for it to have been?
Unfortunately, the exposure of most people to history is limited to what is taught to them in high school, and maybe even college. After that, most people are more concerned about what happened yesterday than what happened during the days of the Roman Empire or the American Revolution. But, because of the history to which we were exposed in school, we have perceptions of how and why our country was born, the principles upon which it is founded, and how our government works.
Those perceptions are important because, even though we learned them when we were young, they continue to shape our views of what our nation is about and how it should work today and in the future. Consequently, we like to believe that the history lessons that we studied in school that form the basis of our current beliefs were factual, accurate and objective. We do not want to believe that our young minds were subconsciously indoctrinated toward the personal political, social and religious viewpoints of the writers of the history books.
If we believe that our country’s history is important, and further, that it is important to describe that history accurately in textbooks, then Americans should be concerned about the actions last Friday of the Texas Board of Education, when a majority of that Board overruled curriculum standards recommended by a panel of teachers and inserted their own personal political, social and religious views into what should be contained in history, economics and sociology
How would you go about it? Would you conduct years of research into how our country came into existence and to grow, and each major event that molded us into what we are? Would you be painstaking to record everything as accurately and objectively as possible, and to avoid injecting your biases and prejudices into your writing? Or, would you write it in the way that you would have liked for it to have been?
Unfortunately, the exposure of most people to history is limited to what is taught to them in high school, and maybe even college. After that, most people are more concerned about what happened yesterday than what happened during the days of the Roman Empire or the American Revolution. But, because of the history to which we were exposed in school, we have perceptions of how and why our country was born, the principles upon which it is founded, and how our government works.
Those perceptions are important because, even though we learned them when we were young, they continue to shape our views of what our nation is about and how it should work today and in the future. Consequently, we like to believe that the history lessons that we studied in school that form the basis of our current beliefs were factual, accurate and objective. We do not want to believe that our young minds were subconsciously indoctrinated toward the personal political, social and religious viewpoints of the writers of the history books.
If we believe that our country’s history is important, and further, that it is important to describe that history accurately in textbooks, then Americans should be concerned about the actions last Friday of the Texas Board of Education, when a majority of that Board overruled curriculum standards recommended by a panel of teachers and inserted their own personal political, social and religious views into what should be contained in history, economics and sociology
