While it may be historical in nature, much of what we’re taught in school about history is a deceptive reduction. I well remember year after year of the same badly done documentary hopping from region to region, with the topics always coinciding with the national holidays. We always seemed to be talking about Columbus around October and the Pilgrims around November reaching some sort of climax around President’s Day with a discussion of Abraham Lincoln. Because of this many of my people have been led to view this man as some sort of saint, whereas it took a college professor to explain that if he could have brought the South back to the union without freeing a single slave he would have.
Our textbooks have been little more than bound volumes of propaganda leaflets. Our teachers have been mostly unwitting ministers of the same. It would have been more honest, but probably no less damaging had WWII bomb groups flown over cities daily and sprinkled our lessons over the school buildings. We emerge with our diplomas of indoctrination, most of us knowing little more than what was fed to us.
The only honest historian is the revisionist historian. Only by reading and re-reading as many sources as possible can we approach an accurate picture of our past. While a single revision goes much farther into showing what happened, it usually does not go far enough. Therefore the process must be repeated exhaustively. Beware the person who tries to tell you that revisionist historians are undermining or subverting the truth. To suggest that we know all we need to know about a thing is to do both.