Teach children their history to unlock a wiser future

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 the Indigenous populations were devastated by colonial governments committing genocide.

I was also taught that World War II was a good and just war and the Allied forces, including the United States, had entered World War II to save the world from Nazism and Adolf Hitler. My teachers had taught me that America was the world’s hero, defending democracy and the freedoms 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 I had to learn at home because my public school refused to teach it in a meaningful way. Included 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 women’s 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.

Are today’s youth being fed the same lies? Why? So that kids can grow up blindly patriotic, register for Selective Service, send their children to war to be heroes, be productive but ignorant citizens and pay their taxes?

If we don’t teach our youth the unfettered truths about history, people and the planet, we are setting them up for failure as decision-makers in the modern world. We may be dooming our planet to destruction. Our new generation won’t know whether to support new wars by NATO, vote for fossil fuel mining in national parks, buy from American corporations with Nazi-supporting legacies or join the military to “defend democracy.” They won’t be able to tell a liberal from an autocrat because they won’t know their history.

I believe George Santayana’s forewarning, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

How can our kids make the world a safer place for new generations if they don’t know their history? Once they know the many sides of truth, they can do something to heal the broken world, making it a safer, loving, peaceful and just place where all can thrive.

It is time to step up and teach our kids the toughest truths. It will be the greatest gift we can give them. Give them the chance to more wisely move through the world.

Vanessa Fox is an organizing intern with World Beyond War. She has been an activist for human, animal and environmental justice causes for 25 years. She is currently pursuing her master’s degree in the art of social change at the Starr King School for the Ministry.

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