...by Christopher Hitchens. A great polemic, and truly frightening.
https://us.history.wisc.edu/hist102/readings/hitchens_goodbye.pdf
"In 1988, four years after 1984, the Soviet Union scrapped its official history curriculum and announced that a newly authorized version was somewhere in the works. That was the precise moment at which the regime conceded its own extinction. For true blissed-out and vacant servitude, though, you need an otherwise sophisticated society where no serious history is taught at all."
"...Young Americans are at home with the concept of black holes and the imminence of cloning. The idea that human life may be a cosmic joke is well known to them. They understand that viruses and other microorganisms can be more powerful actors than dictators. The youngest of them share the wised-up humor of The Simpsons ("Springfield Youth Center: Building Unrealistic Hopes Since 1966" ). But can they be allowed to consider their own history as anything other than a story of uplift, or, at worst, a chronicle of obstacles overcome? Not really, says David McCullough, whose Why History? is widely circulated by those hoping for a revival of the subject: "History shows us how to behave. History teaches, reinforces what we believe in, what we stand for, and what we ought to be willing to stand up for. History is—or should be—the bedrock of patriotism, not the chest-pounding kind of patriotism but the real thing, love of country." And no, also, says Joy Hakim, a self-starting amateur historian who decided to write her own textbooks (marketed as A History of US) and ignited a brief spark of hope by breaking the monopoly of so-called educational publishing. Her introduction states:
Learning about our country's history will make you understand what it means to be an American. And being American is a privilege. People all over the world wish that they, too, could be American. Why? Because we are a nation that is trying to be fair to all our citizens.... The more you study history, the more you will realize that all nations are not the same. Some are better than others. Does that seem like an unfair thing to say? Maybe, but we believe it.
The third sentence does express a factual truth. But the reason given in the fifth sentence is mere propaganda, at least insofar as it distinguishes the United States from Italy, say, or Iceland or Chile. In what other discipline may a teacher so readily assume what has to be proved? Many critics have hailed Hakim for contesting the relativists and the guilt-trip historians head-on. But how different is her approach from the standard textbooks of the last generation, entitled as they were: The American Pageant, The American Way, Land of Promise, American Adventures, Life and Liberty, The Challenge of Freedom, Triumph of the American Nation? It was under this benign rule that the current crop of unlettered teachers and distracted pupils was sown."
Feb 26, 2012 @ 14:23:03
I don't remember being taught anything so blatantly biased. We were taught exactly how we crushed the natives and participated in slave trading.
