Too often the history taught in schools is superficial and only teaches those fables that were created to induce patriotism and adherence to authority (George Washington, "I cannot tell a lie" is one of those). And too often history is taught by teachers who do not have a full perspective of history.
My world history teacher in high school was one of those teachers. He only knew history as had been taught to him with no depth to the stories he had been told - civilization began in Babylon, moved to Egypt, then Greece, Rome, Northern Europe, England, and was finally brought to America by Christopher Columbus. As far as he knew nothing else happened any where in the world other than those locations. He was barely familiar with the Reformation - it happened after "civilization" had moved to Northern Europe so was not important. I once asked him what was happening in China at a specific time in history and he told me they were living in caves. Even as an eighth grader who had not studied a lot of history I knew that was wrong.
Books such as "1492" and "1493" by Charles Mann are great. In"1492" he used every resource he could find to build a history of the civilizations in the American prior to Columbus' arrival - European histories, Indian histories (what was not destroyed by the Europeans, and what has been deciphered by anthropologists), archeological studies, and Indian oral histories as recorded by the Europeans. From the information Mann was able to find that the American Indian civilizations were larger, more expansive, and in some cases more scientifically and technologically advanced than the European civilization of the time.
No history course I ever took - or even any anthropology class I took in college - admitted that most descriptions of American Indian cultures by most Europeans were of remnant populations. As much as 90-95% of the people living in the Americas in 1492 died from introduced diseases. Each new disease might have killed 10-30% with each wave, but there was wave after wave of various diseases over the first one hundred and fifty years.
The Black Death is estimated to have killed 30% of Europe's population and that seriously diminished Europe's culture for several hundred years as knowledge was lost with those people. Now think of losing 90% of your people over several generations - each wave of death removed essential people and knowledge. At the same time the survivors were being warred upon, enslaved, and flat out murdered so that the resources of their land could be stolen.
Maybe elementary school kids should only be taught a frame work of history - but leave out the myths and teach facts. Too many people need to unlearn the garbage they were taught so they can learn what really happened!
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