Writing history?

To begin with, I must note the New York Times writer's subtle anger towards the Texas Republicans. His anger was directed at the fact that Republicans were adding their bias to history, yet in the article he pointed out only points in the education reform which he found worthy of criticism, not any positives. It was a delicious bit of irony which made the article, although entertaining, hardly practical enough for me to believe the writer as a credible source of hard fact. In Chimamanda Adichie's mind, reading only this article would be insufficient, an incomplete story. It would be merely one fraction of rising action chunked out of a fully comprehensive novel on the subject of historical reform.

Through the Socratic Circle, we students, with our curious little minds, were able to get a firsthand taste of what it is like to see how stories can be incomplete and one speaker can be partial to a certain way of telling. Had both articles we read been unbiased, the discussions of each half of the class would have been the exact same. They were not because each article looked at the controversy from its own perspective.

Attacking the textbook issue is obviously no easy task; otherwise, it would have been resolved long ago. Although I may not know the right way to solve it, from the Socratic discussions, it seemed practical to me that a predominant bias cannot be cancelled out by adding an opposing bias to the mix as the Texas Republicans seemed to be attempting. Each bias seems merely to create an increasingly confusing stew of mismatched beliefs. Only bare fact, stripped of all political sway, could allow for an unarguably fair history. And of course, in the textbook, all points of view available would have to be included, no cultures shoved aside as less important or more.

But a child's attention span is short. Even into high school. Discounting a very beautiful, but miniscule population of children enthralled by facts of the past, children prefer active, exciting adventures of the present, such as video games or frisbee. Time in the classroom in which a teacher actually controls the attention of his or her students is minimal, and to increase that time, the teacher must make their subject interesting. When playing frisbee, most young children do not want to first study the various frisbee-making companies and the various types of frisbees which they could toss, but instead pick up the first frisbee they see and throw it as hard as they can. As with history, a child does not want to hear how various Native American tribes gathered food, but how Geronimo used his telepathic abilities to sneak through enemy camps without leaving a trace and could be shot through the belly without leaving any sign of a grievous wound.

History is quite expansive according to state standards. Life could go back as far as 3.5 billion years and history even further, possibly even to the beginning of time. Or, in a world like the one illustrated in 1984, could be completely based on perception and only go back as far as one individual or another chose to take it. But since we students follow along state standards, there is a lot of material to cover, and only some of it can be fed to us at school. The rest must be voluntary. Therefore, although the desire to infect ignorant children with their personal bias is great, the small amount of information we can be fed should not be corrupted by whether the Republican party of the past was awesome for helping along the Civil Rights Movement, but merely HOW it helped along the Civil Rights Movement. And possibly how the Democrats and maybe Libertarians played a role. But that might be unpatriotic. So no. Nevermind.