September 13, 2008

Miseducating our children

Schools teach Black and White history but not Native American Indian history.  Why?i agree with all of this...but in reality...it will never be that way... i was raised in a school with all white students and in the text book it said that natives were "savage" people.. in the text book it told how violent we were and i disagreed and i told the teacher the truth he got offended...i was told to stay after class and he said that he was teaching out of the book and i told him as a history teacher he should learn more about the native americans rather than going by what the text book said and that there was two sides to every story and i was not going to sit in class and listen to the bullshit that was in the text book and he got even more offended..i told him i read history books about my people and i corrected him.. i was the most hated student in the class but at least i felt i was in the right..Comment:  This isn't some some old fogey reporting what happened in the early part of the 20th century. The writer is Kyra, age 18, in Iowa. She's talking about something she experienced within the last decade.

For an excellent discussion of how biased our textbooks are, read Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen. No teacher should claim or believe a textbook is fair and impartial. Not without analyzing it the way Loewen did.

For more on the subject, see The Harm of Native Stereotyping:  Facts and Evidence.

P.S. I guess Iowa's schools don't teach proper capitalization or punctuation either. <g>

Below:  What kids are still learning today?

2 comments:

ed gein said...

Trouble is,the newcomers want the original inhabitants of this land to go away. Obviously that did not happen.Everything material that the newcomers have obtained,resourses,land monetary gain has come at the illegal expense of the Original People.The Jews have kept alive the story of the European Holocaust.The Original People on this land must do the same.

Rob said...

As a newcomer whose earliest known ancestor (William Palmer) arrived in 1636, I don't mind if the original inhabitants of this land stay. In fact, I'd prefer it that way. ;-)