history is written by...

After a short History Channel documentary about Juan Ponce de Leon, and learning all the inaccuracies of my 8th Grade Social Studies class, I wonder just how many other facts passed on to students by teachers and textbooks just aren't quite factual.  Like dumbing down photosynthesis until it really isn't correctly described, or how we don't really subtract, we add with negative numbers.  As a substitute teacher, I ran across several examples where simplification runs that fine line between truth and fallacy.  But is there any other way?  We can't exactly teach O-Chem to 10-year-olds.

To top it all off, Texas school boards are pushing toward a "conservative" history that makes a euphemism of slavery and what all.  Don't even get me started on Creationism.  And being so big and numerous, and in proximity to publishers, Texas schools have a big say in what national publishers publish.  Scary.

This is what happens when we take history out of the able hands of historians and science away from the scientists.

Deborah Lindsay, at First Community Church, made a superb plea for tolerance and peace that is now all over the internet.  And one point she made is valid here:  it is not right to exalt one faith above all others at the expense of others.  Here I would argue to include "at the expense of education."  Support your faith, yes, but make it govern a whole society?  Nope.  That's theocracy, not democracy.  Ben and Tom would hate that.  (And here I mean Franklin and Jefferson, two founding fathers).

My latest task is to outline a chart for my dad making explicit the education and background of the founding fathers that Tea Partiers and Conservatives alike so love to invoke.  I find it funny that the same FoxNews blondes who mock Cambridge, Massachusetts, for its educational elite worship founding fathers who are...gasp...Harvard educated.

I'm not so radical that I demand "history" henceforth be called "herstory," like some feminists who have no understanding of etymology, but I do yearn for the day that history is written by objective scholars, not the subjective and partisan few.