Education or Indoctrination?

We often hear, as in middle and high school, about how Lincoln "freed the slaves." If any of you are like me, you probably thought he sounded like a swell guy. Not so much. I haven't decided if the "stories" I learned in my history classes had to be simplified as a casualty of  a brimming curriculum or if teachers were told not to rock the boat and to make all the presidents sound like superheros, bereft of flaws.

On my first day of American History in high school, the teacher asked a question (I can't recall what it was) in regards to the class discussion of the British. I flippantly responded with my knowledge of all the people the British have historically enslaved, slaughtered, and culturally decimated under the guise of conquering (I purposely put "historically" because I really don't have anything against the British, I just don't believe in rewriting history in order to not make a race of people sound bad; no one cuts Germany any slack so why the British?). Apparently this was not the answer he wanted to hear. Brushing my answer aside, he went on to the point he wanted to make. In this way, students learn to disregard what tests, teachers, and the curriculum do not require them to know. They focus singularly on what's "important" (aka, predominantly white, male, and upper-class) and ignore sidebar stories (aka, women, racial minorities, and the lower-class).

I remember beginning to question my education as far back as seventh grade. My textbook had condensed the Irish potato famine into a paragraph. It flabbergasted me. As third generation Irish, I'm a little ways off of being able to claim that as my race. However, my father, proud of his Irish heritage, has made the culture and history a strong part of my upbringing. I won't go into another of my tirades about what actually happened, but I couldn't believe that such a tragic incidence of genocide had been so measly wrapped up into a paragraph and pushed aside. Again, Americans didn't want to make the British look bad.

Through these incidences, I learned that Americans value individualism, success, and achievement. I have trouble accepting these ideas because I know what lurks behind some of these "achievements." I know that for every race that looks strong, progressive, and dominant, another race lies trampled upon and oppressed. I mentioned Lincoln earlier and how he "freed the slaves" and went to war with the south over "slavery." First of all, you can discover those falsities on your own. Secondly, as Sherman Alexie draws notice to in his book "War Dances," in 1862 (one year before the Emancipation Proclamation, if you recall) Lincoln ordered the execution of 300 Sioux Indians, condemned in unfair trials. So if classes that place emphasis on certain people while leaving others out, reinforcing ideals and values by omission, do not qualify as rhetoric in the sense that they sway how people think about and view the world, I'm not sure what does.