Columns When I was a little girl, I was nourished with healthy food, clean drinking water, safe housing, access to education, adequate medical care, and the loving support of family and friends. As a result, I became an idealist, a perpetual optimist, a lover of people, and a dreamer. It seemed that the world was a magical place where anything was possible.
In public school, my teachers disguised the truth about the world as it really existed, reinforcing my rosy worldview. While I did learn about wars, which offended my optimism, I was taught that they were a necessary evil, and that good always wins over evil. For example, I learned that the New World’s colonists fought off the “bad Native Americans.” My teachers didn’t tell me that the Indigenous populations were decimated by colonial governments committing genocide.
I was also taught that World War II was a good and just war, and that the Allied forces, including the United States, had entered World War II to save the world from Nazism and Adolph Hitler. My teachers had taught me that America was the world’s hero, defending democracy and the freedoms that we enjoy today. I wasn’t told this about WWII:
“Hitler’s rise was abetted by some of America’s most powerful corporations and businesses,” Gar Smith wrote about David Swanson’s book, Leaving World War II Behind. “The U.S. ignored Japan’s repeated offers to surrender in order to demonstrate the power of its new nuclear weapons.” Wars are no longer waged for territory, Swanson notes: “they’re waged for weapons sales, fossil fuels, lusts for power, and bragging rights.’ ”
In fact, there was much history that I had to learn at home because my public school refused to teach it in a meaningful way. Included in that were the reasons for the rise of Hitler and Nazism, the horrors of the Holocaust, the cruelty of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the history of slavery in America, the struggles of the Civil Rights Movement, the obstacles faced by the Suffrage Movement, the history of Indigenous Peoples, and much more. These histories were marginalized in public school, just brushed over or ignored completely. I was lied to.
