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Evidence Of Revision

“High school was hard enough,” Peter Davis of Cracked.com writes in his article The 5 Most Ridiculous Lies You Were Taught in History Class. “What with all the video games and boobies to distract us from our homework. What makes it even harder is having to unlearn all of the stuff they taught us in elementary school that turned out to be utter crap.” This article deals with five of the cuter, more forgivable lies we’re taught in school. Stories like Washington chopping down a cherry tree and such, a really fun read with some cool illustrations.

Myself, I went to Catholic School when I was a kid. While there they tried to teach some pretty dumb things like that women have an extra rib because one was taken from Adam and given to Eve. And then when I went to highschool in public school, we got ridiculously old textbooks, and in one class some kids weren’t even given books (which I got in trouble for making a big deal of, silly me.) Certainly, the quality of some of the tools we’re giving our kids are leaving every child behind.

But fear not parents! There are some cool books you can check out and use to help supplement your child’s education at home.

“James Loewen spent two years at the Smithsonian Institute surveying twelve leading high school textbooks of American History. What he found was an embarrassing amalgam of bland optimism, blind patriotism, and misinformation pure and simple, weighing in at an average of four-and-a-half pounds and 888 pages.”

The Lies My Teacher Told Me [Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong], is great book to check out, here’s a link to the google books preview.

“Textbooks keep students in the dark about the nature of history,” Loewen writes. “…[They] employ such a godlike tone, it never occurs to most students to question them…As a result of this, most high school seniors are hamstrung in their efforts to analyze controversial issues in our society” (p.16).

It has great reviews from all points of the political spectrum.  And here’s another book by Loewen called Lies Across America that includes interesting info like:

• The USS Intrepid, the “feel-good” war museum, celebrates its glorious service in World War II but nowhere mentions the three tours it served in Vietnam.
• The Jefferson Memorial misquotes from the Declaration of Independence and skews Jefferson’s writings to present this conflicted slave owner as a near abolitionist.
• Abraham Lincoln had been dead for thirty years when his birthplace cabin was built.

Howard Zinn, Professor Emeritus, Boston University, said of Lies My Teacher Told Me: “Every teacher, every student of history, every citizen should read this book.” And here’s a link to Zinn’s book preview while we’re at it: A People’s History of the United States.

Now, I love independent documentaries. Sure they lack the polish, and the stars, but they more than make up for it (when you find a good one) in entertainment and educational value. So I hope you’ll check out this series for the great bits of history that they could’ve taught us about in school, and actually have made class interesting! There’s a lot of clips I never got to see, and we have all this technology, what’s the point of recording every bloody thing that happens if we’re not going to show it educationally? Besides, kids these days learn more from tv and the internet, video makes a much more lasting impression, I bet.

Evidence of Revision is an excellent documentary for all the footage that I’ve never seen before about some of the most important moments in American history. Our older friends who were around then probably haven’t seen all of these.

Some small quibbles, I would have taken out a lot of the slow (strangely negatived) footage and dead air and cover some more stories. How about one on Iran-Contra? That would be really relevant today. Or why not the build up to Iraq? Or how about the Civil War, or the American Revolution? There seems to be a billion on the world wars and Vietnam, but I’d like to know more about these too, especially since so much of what we’re taught about those two in school turns out to be false.

Either way, I’m a stickler for all those really old grainy news reels.

There’s something very refreshing about newscasters who aren’t just reading garbage filler off a teleprompter. Its neat to see a guy sitting there with a headset on, not really caring what he looked like rather than being caked under 5 inches of makeup. And there’s definitely something really great about it being in black and white, rather than a mind hurting flash of graphics and crawls.

So if you like that stuff, plus want more information on history than the textbooks and lame stream media will offer, you should check it out. This playlist includes the entire 5 disc series each divided up into 10 min parts of 10, so you can skip around from subject to subject. The MLK one at the end has a ton of amazing clips in it too, so check that out. And if you ever want to recommend a doc that you think people would find interesting, please drop me a comment and I’ll be sure to check it out!