Hi Friend,
My wife and I homeschool our eleven-year-old son, and one of the history textbooks we are using is pretty good for learning general US history, but it also contains deceitful state
propaganda that I use as an opportunity to get him critically thinking.
For example, in teaching the so-called "Civil War", which was not actually a civil war, the textbook rightly notes two things that Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation did not do: one was to free the slaves in the south since Lincoln didn't control the south, and the other was to free the slaves in slave states that remained in the Union.
I discussed with him how the proclamation was really just a propaganda document that offered to let southern states continue the institution of slavery if they surrendered, just the same as the book acknowledged that it also communicated to northern slave states that they could keep their slaves.
Then he started pointing out to me how the book contradicts itself, first having admitted the truth that the document didn't actually free any slaves (a fact that the National Archives itself informs site visitors), while at the same time claiming that it did in numerous subsequent statements and exercise questions.
The textbook also makes no attempt to reconcile the contradiction between claiming that the Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves and its statement about a subsequent Constitutional amendment ending slavery. Again, my son and I discussed how the logical way to reconcile both of these self-contradictions is by recognizing how misleading the textbook is being by saying the proclamation freed the slaves.
We also Googled and read Lincoln's inaugural address together, and we discussed how Lincoln explicitly stated upon assuming office that he had neither the authority nor the intention of ending slavery. This, of course, is not mentioned in the textbook.
The other day, I was flipping through chapters of the textbook we haven't gotten to yet, and I noticed it described the US's war on Iraq by saying that Saddam Hussein was given an deadline to let in UN weapons inspectors, and because Hussein refused to cooperate, the US fought to overthrow his dictatorship so Iraqis could be free.
That narrative, of course, is false. The truth is that Iraq did let in UN inspectors, and the history book makes no mention of the fact that the war was waged on a false pretext since Iraq in fact had no weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
Kind of an important detail, don't you think?
Of course, that type of state propaganda is exactly what I learned throughout my childhood in the government school system, which is among the reasons we homeschool our son.
You might argue that we should scrap this particular textbook and find another, but I suspect most of them are going to be similar, and I think it's actually a good thing for our son to be exposed to such typical propaganda designed to characterize the US government as a benevolent actor.
It creates opportunities to assign additional research projects to him and to get him to think about things critically for himself.
Of course, we don't rely on that book alone. Apart from other book readings, we also have purchased the two-volume set America's History: A Tuttle Twins Series of
Stories, which provides a more honest, critical, and liberty-minded approach to teaching children history.
So, to all the parents on my list with a child in the range of 7-13 years, you might want to check it out!
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