Some things change only in detail.



Today, we teach our children (at least the ones in California) that the Chinese immigrants built the railroads and other preposterous falsehoods.



A generation ago, we taught our children (at least in the South) that the darkies were happy to be slaves.



I'm way less concerned about no history than I am about fake history.

Harry, your comment is exactly wrong, and I have a feeling you know that. A nation of immigrants needs a common myth to bind it together. It is our strength that, rather than a shared race or religion, it is our common adopted history that makes us one nation. The heuristic function of a common history would always trump the needs of strict accuracy. We are simply lucky that our unvarnished history lends itself to a heroic mythos.

Harry, if our next generation learns nothing from the past, then it will have to come up with its own ideas about how we should be governed; and since other nations are doing the same, we will surely approximate to the world average in quality of governance. But our heritage is one of greatness. Why should we abandon it?

"To forget and-I will venture to say-to get one's history wrong are essential factors in the making of a nation."

-Ernest Renan (1823-92)

I guess the French were unable to forget.



I take your point, David, but there has to be

some congruence between the myth and the

facts. Some facts are indeed ascertainable.

That the Chinese built the railroads is antifactual.

The real story of who built the railroads

contributes even more to the myth and does

not outrage honesty.



To teach that the darkies were happy outrages

fact and contributes nothing to the myth.



In Ken Auletta's "The Underclass," he quotes

a young black woman as saying (this in about

1980) that there was still a slave market in

Pittsburgh, at least she had heard that there

was. We get what history we have through

more channels than schools and textbooks.



Perhaps I feel especially sensitive about this,

because I went to Catholic schools, where

all the history was faked.

Harry:



Yet it's also a lie to teach that their lives in Africa were preferable, isn't it?

Yes, if you mean materially. There are people who would rather be poor and hungry in their own hovels than warm and well-fed in somebody else's mansions.



Basil Davidson ("Black Mother") makes the point better than anyone else I know that the African slave trade interrupted social development there. (Elsewhere, too, of course.)



I don't know how sophisticated a view of the situation it is possible to present to young people. I was amused, years ago, to read the comment of a Ugandan economist that the British had conquered his country "not with the rifle but with the canned herring."

Africa is hardly a bastion of folks who've chosen freedom over security.

That's true.



Most seem to have neither.