American History Textbooks: Omission and Misrepresentation of Facts?

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School systems have become the domain of learning about our own cultures; it prescribes what we know and how we engage within the global sphere. By students attending School it is a way to intersect knowledge to the new generations to come. We use textbooks in schools to help facilitate the information that has been passed down through the years of progression. In order to understand ones heritage one needs to understand what occurred and how one came to be. Education has become a fundamental process in which all youths must obtain too in order to develop into a valued functioning member of society. Educators strive to educate youth in the history of their culture but the reality of the truth is that history is a false perception derived from years and year of colonization, white hierarchy. “Textbooks are very influential message senders in the formal kindergarten through 12th grade school systems in the United States. The realities of students reading these textbooks are shaped by the information printed, especially of things that are unfamiliar and unavailable to them” (Clark & Moore, 2004). Textbooks have in turn brought upon a false history and claims to what the truth really is, but whose truth is it, whose truth is dominant, colonial truth is dominant and textbooks within the school system provide false truths of history to back up colonial ways. Colonization is a continuing process within the school system by means of history textbooks; it is this book that claims to speak the truth but only one truth.

Valued educators have become enforcers of colonial ways; some don’t even know that they portray that function, the content within textbooks have become common knowledge as the truth and the truth in turn must be spoken o...

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...t by rearranging its content to instigate a higher dominance. Colonization is a continuing process but with the help of critical thinking it could mean a change in understanding cultural differences and history that is expressed in history textbooks.

Works Cited

Vine Deloria. 2003. Cluster Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. University of Oklahoma Press: Oklahoma.

Clark, Barbara & Moore James, Tami. 2004. The Impact of “Message Senders” on What is Ture: Native Americans in Nebraska History Books. University of Nebraska: Kearney, NE.

Sanchez, Tony. 2007. The Depiction of Native Americans in Recent (1991-2004) Secondary American History Textbooks: How Far Have We Come?. University of Toledo: Toledo, OH.

Sewall, Gilbert. 1988. American History Textbooks: Where Do We Go from Here?. The Phi Delta Kappan, Vol. 69, No. 8 (Apr., 1988), pp. 552-558.

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