Growing up, I was never particularly interested in history, specifically US history. Every year, we learned the same monotonous progression of events, starting with the colonization of America and ending with the Civil Rights movement. The elementary and middle school curriculums painted America as a haven for immigrants and a land of equality for all, as propelled by the "American dream." It wasn't until taking AP US history my junior year of high school that I started to realize how skewed my depiction of American history had been for most of my life.

It is for this very reason that in 2015, Oklahoma tried to vote to ban the AP US history course, which had been redesigned by College Board. Dan Fischer, a state representative said that course emphasizes "what is bad about America" and that the new framework "trades an emphasis on America's founding principles of Constitutional government in favor of robust analyses of gender and racial oppression and class ethnicity and the lives of marginalized people, where the emphasis on instruction is of America as a nation of oppressors and exploiters."

While the course did introduce me to American oppression and the drastic consequences of prejudice and racism in our country, it wasn't until a couple of days ago when I truly began to understand how little I knew about the injustices that are too easily swept under the table in most educational institutions across the nation.

After watching a one hour interview with the creators of the documentary "No Mas Bebes," a film that follows the lives of Mexican immigrant women who sued the US government because they were sterilized without their consent in Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center while giving birth, I was completely in shock about how little attention was given to the issue, especially since the road to reproductive justice has been so widely discussed in today's society. I had never heard of this tragic phenomenon until viewing the footage from the speaker panel and unfortunately, I was not alone.

Over 80% of the students in my class who were watching the video with me had never heard of the conflict either.

Discrimination and prejudice have always been an integral part of the society in which we will live and sugarcoating the truth about the treatment of minority groups in this country are not helping anyone. Ignorance is not bliss when it comes to educating future generations and providing them with the tools to solve modern conflicts.

Teachers should not be waiting until high school to start exposing some of the questionable decisions made by our government to their students - the process should be happening when kids are much younger and when their perceptions of what is fair and what isn't are the most malleable. I agree that it is not a teacher's job to adulterate a young child's perception of the world, but there are several ways in which the history curriculum can be more honest and upfront about the past.

It is the only way in which we can ensure that the mistakes that were made in the past do not rehash in the future.