This was an enlightening read from the Zinn Education Project:

The tsunami of laws and Executive Orders attacking public school curricula mobilize a range of doublespeak, from “divisive concepts” to “race scapegoating” to “psychological stress;” many include the admonition that teachers may not teach students that “the United States is fundamentally or irredeemably racist or sexist.”

One has only to read the actual history of the United States to see how adhering to that admonition would be a monumental lie. I still don’t understand what harm there is in admitting that your people killed countless people in past times, then working to restore power balances…oh. Ok, I get it.

I found this portion of the post particularly relevant:

States like Florida insist that we never teach U.S. history as “something other than the creation of a new nation based largely on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.”

But that’s not history, it’s fairy tale. It distorts both past and present. Our students can handle a past that is complicated and honest enough to provide substantial insights into today’s society. But it is this meaningful link between past and present that terrifies the Right. That’s why legislators in Texas have outlawed one of the traditional staples of the civics classroom: the “write your legislator” assignment.

The Texas law reads, “a teacher may not require, make part of a course, or award a grade or course credit . . . for a student’s . . . efforts to persuade members of the legislative or executive branch at the federal, state, or local level to take specific actions by direct communication.”

Just like the Forget the Alamo story, much of the history we are taught is a fairy tale.

In the book, James W. Loewen (he passed away August 19, 2021) points out:

I began with Helen Keller because omitting the last sixty-four years of her life exemplifies the sort of culture-serving distortion that will be discussed later in this book. We teach Keller as an ideal, not a real person, to inspire our young people to emulate her. Keller becomes a mythic figure, the “woman who overcame” but for what? There is no content!

Consistent with our American ideolog of individualism, the truncated version of Helen Keller’s story sanitizes a hero, leaving only the virtues of self-help and hard work.

Keller herself, while scarcely opposing hard work, explicitly reject this ideology.

As a result of what I read of Helen Keller, my perspective changed as well. In either case, I found myself saying, “What a bunch of lies I was fed in American high school.” You have hope that historians will be truth tellers, but no such hope for textbook publishers and teachers forced to lie to the next generation.

“Cuando reclamamos nuestra historia, reclamamos nuestro destino”: When we claim our past, we claim our future. (source: Texas Monthly)