In my 9th grade civics class our teacher had us read excerpts from James Loewen's book "Lies My Teacher Told Me". The book discusses how many of the subjects we learn from our elementary and secondary history books are biased and inaccurate. Some of the subjects covered are slavery, native americans, vietnam, reconstruction, and civil rights.
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While it is great that many schools now offer multiple tellings of history at the highschol level, wouldn't it be better to teach younger students that there is more than one side to every story? If we start teaching traditional history while also critiquing the decisions they made we can change the way we view things in the future. By showing the negative side of our history along with the positives, we can learn from our mistakes and improve our strategy the next time around.
When exploring history it is very hard to sort out the truth from the lies, since every telling is going to have a bias. I think that history is still important to explore despite this though since it allows people to see where they came from and teaches people how to avoid past mistakes. Since it is practically impossible to escape bias in history and also impossible to avoid teaching it the best approach in my mind is to teach history from many perspectives so that the differences in the tellings can be seen and students can recognize the biases with in the texts.
This blog stuck out to me because we just discussed this book in TE401 today. There was an article in the book about The First Thanksgiving. Our discussion pretty much said that all of the things we learned about in elementary school were lies about Thanksgiving. We discussed whether or not we should tell the truth of history and give the facts that aren't usually given (like Todd mentioned there are lots that go unnoticed which would shock us), or if we should just continue to lie about history. What do you guys think? My question is if we don't have artifacts how do we know what happened for sure? I think a good point was brought up when it was said that we should show both the good and bad sides of a story.
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