By Arianna Bekas
The purpose of history is to document not only the amazing accomplishments that the people of our world have engaged in but also to share the horrific events that have happened in our world with the hope that future generations will not make the same mistakes. However, this purpose is becoming hard to fulfill for one very big reason. The U.S education system, specifically in regards to its history curriculum, consistently fails its people by sugar-coating and whitewashing our very own history. For too long people have remained silent while textbooks are made to leave out the injustices committed by the American government long ago. It is clear that the proper teachings of history must be a priority because it is a danger to everyone to have a country filled with people ignorant of their very own past, I mean just take a look at what’s happening in this country now.
To start with, textbooks made by McGraw-Hill have made some very interesting changes to the ways in which they refer to slavery. First off they no longer call the slave trade, the slave trade. Instead, they decided to name it the Trans-Atlantic Trade Network. But that’s not even the most amusing part. Within the text, they no longer refer to slaves as slaves. They refer to them as foreign laborers, “The Atlantic Trade brought millions of workers.” And yes that is a sentence in an actual textbook. I don’t even really feel that I need to explain what’s wrong with this, however, I do expect that some people would read this and think that it is a perfectly okay expression. Here’s why it’s not, these people who were brought over on this trade network had no choice, they were torn apart from their families, shackled, beaten, crammed into the hull of boats as if they were nothing more than cargo. These people were not workers who had unions protecting their rights, these people were not workers with salaries to compensate their work, these people were slaves and we should do right by them and their plight by talking about the full extent to which they were tortured and used for our countries benefit.
Another topic that American textbooks love to rush through is the treatment of Native Americans. Through my experiences with history lessons, I have begun to notice that our textbooks never actually discuss the full extent to which the Native Americans suffered at the hands of Americans. Even the Trail of Tears is downplayed, and the suffering of the Cherokee people is almost completely disregarded. The textbooks do not mention how a treaty was broken in the process of moving them out of the way of American expansions, the textbooks don’t mention the death counts, but the textbooks do praise the very man who was the cause of these sufferings… Andrew Jackson. Jackson then went on to be president of the United States. How the textbooks love to shine their light on him, but never on the people who suffered at his hands.
When it comes to history that refers to what went on during World War II it seems as though it is pretty thorough, but when you take into account the fact that there is a large number of Americans who do not know what the Japanese internment camps were or that there is a small number of people in our country who have the audacity to claim that the Holocaust was a hoax, that’s how we know we have failed to properly educate our people. To start, the Japanese internment camps were set up after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. This is when the American government rounded up people of Japanese descent and moved them into these isolated areas because they were a potential “threat”. As for how we discuss the Holocaust, I have only one word… Disappointing. We need to speak the truth of what really happened to those people persecuted by the Nazi’s. We need to show the liberation videos, we need to show the photos of gas chambers with claw marks clawed into the concrete walls made by people desperate to get out. We need to talk about how the U.S and countless other countries turned away refugees because they would be a greater burden to carry. Our textbooks need to talk about how the U.S knew that there were camps set up and that people were being held in them and we did nothing. We need to show the truth of what went on, and how these people were tortured so that way we don’t have people drawing swastika’s like they are jokes. We need to educate Americans on the monstrosities of those camps and the experiments performed on people so that way we never make the same mistake again, and allow millions of people to be murdered because we were too caught up with ourselves to actually take action, because if we had gone in sooner so many more lives would not have been lost.
If we do not learn from our history we are doomed to repeat it, and with the way our school systems are currently educating us on our past, I can say that we might just be in trouble. The truth is, we have got to stop sugar coating things, and America as a whole needs to get over this whole hero complex where we think that our country is this bright and shining star that has always been the face of freedom and justice to all because it hasn’t. But that’s okay, as long as we can see and understand that we have made mistakes and we try to learn from them. But right now we are not doing that, instead, we are trying to rewrite history to make it seem like we didn’t actually do the horrible things that we did. In doing this we are just hurting ourselves because there is nothing to gain from being ignorant.