Last week, I read an article announcing College Board’s decision to change the AP US history curriculum, and I almost cried. Of course, I had been reading for weeks about policies passed in Texas which would remove the Jim Crow laws, among other atrocities, from the history curriculum in public schools. The changes to the AP US history course will include a lessening of the length of time spent studying the sufferings of Native Americans. The lawmakers and College Board officials disregard the purpose of education: to understand the truth about the world. As witnesses promise in court, “to tell the truth, the whole truth,” it is an educator’s duty to tell students the entire truth. Education equips children with a gift no one can take from them, with the tools necessary to imagine and create the inventions of the future, and the passion to change the world for the better. A distorted education, however, will injure society.
People may burn books, or fiddle with an author’s language to satisfy their own ignorant needs. We could be starving, lost, our eyesight poor from air pollution, but no one can take away our education. Education is the key to survival and success, the only means by which humans can save Earth from the mistakes of the past and the present. The further we expand our critical thinking, the closer we come to finding solutions for climate change, for cancers, and more. As Plato highlighted in The Republic, we are like prisoners in a cave, only perceiving the outside world through the shadows on the wall. Education frees us from our chains, allowing us to turn and see the true light of the world, and hence our society advances. We each specialize in a craft that we are suited for and that, hopefully, we love. In the end, we become pieces in one engine that powers civilization. Without education and the sometimes sour truth, that engine will stop. We will land generations gullible enough to believe that 2 + 2 = 5, as in Orwell’s 1984. How can a person with such skewed knowledge of the world create progress? We depend on future generations to spark the world anew with their imaginations, giving us renewable energy sources, the chance to explore other stars and galaxies, and more. While changing the US history curriculum itself may not affect all education so drastically, where does the line end? Is this the beginning of an entirely government-censored education, expunged from all ideas that could lead a child down the “wrong” path, as judged by self-fueling politicians? It would be unethical for a judge to taint the verdict with personal feelings, just as it is wrong for governments and educators to force their views upon children. History, and all subjects, should be taught as they are, without an adult’s opinions blurring a child’s view. When children are old enough, they should be permitted come to conclusions about history for themselves.
Education is about the truth. Rewrite history, and we might as well not teach our children anything. I would rather see my future children illiterate than fed false information about the origins of their country and the battles that had to be fought so they can sit in a classroom, free from tyrannical restriction. What happened to America, “the land of the free?” We are not free when our government chooses to edit history like a college essay. We might as well be living in the world of 1984, in which the government can change its history on a whim and switch enemies by the hour, without questions. We might as well live in a totalitarian regime, like in China where “Tiananmen Square massacre” is not searchable on the internet nor talked about at all. Do we want to follow in those footsteps?
Are we to forget the tragedy of the Trail of Tears, for the sake of making our ancestors seem kinder? Will the next edits remove the Civil Rights movement, since, after all, the changes in Texas’ policy includes removing the Jim Crow Laws from history books? Today, in 2015, years after the death of Martin Luther King, we are still fighting for equality and justice, as more and more minorities are slaughtered by the authorities. Will history books, decades from now, leave out Sandra Bland and Michael Brown? Will they leave out the murders of transgender teenagers and the fear society has of all people who do not conform to the status quo? Finally, what if we were to leave the Holocaust out of history books, to paint a happier picture of the past? The next generations would forget the innocent lives lost, in the same way we are forcing them to forget the lost lives of Native Americans, African Americans, and so many more. Perhaps the Statue of Liberty was inscribed with a mocking lie: “Give me your...huddled masses yearning to breath free…” She stands as a proud representation of freedom, but her symbolism crumbles as we realize that the words are rusty and covered with mold.
The United States is meant to be the land of the free, my home as much as it is the next's. Our founders declared our independence with the intention of creating a free and just society, and our history, amidst the negativity, shows our openness to immigrants searching for a new life. I am proud to call myself an American, but I cannot say that pride will last, nor that our founders would be proud of recent political decisions. To amend history textbooks, feeding children false information and damaging their education, is to spit in the face of freedom and progress. In a world in which we forget our mistakes, we repeat those mistakes again and again. Is that the United States you want your children to grow up in?
