Christopher Columbus Research Paper

American History as its taught today in the K-12th grades fits quite well with the Banking Concept of teaching. Teach, memorize, repeat. Even given that history books themselves are so big with so much information it leaves teachers unable to truly allow students the opportunity to do more than just get the facts and move on to the next and gives little time for discussion. There are many parts of history that aren’t often enough questioned or studied. Teachers are depositing history that is much closer to fiction than fact to our students and due to the governments involvement in whats taught it is not giving the generations younger than us the opportunity to comprehend how the US ended up in the condition it is in today, therefore missing

When Christopher Columbus found the “New World” he basically made the Natives out to be a “lower class”, enslaving, dismembering and raping the people. Natives who to this day never gotten back sacred land taken from them over the years. From Christopher Columbus's European discovery of America up until today we have been taught that the white colonialism of the “New World” has been anything short of the beginning of the American way. Commemorating him finding an already inhibited land shows the governments true lack for history and need for control over the people. If the Government can control our history books and teaching they surely do have an upper hand at leading us into a desired future to their liking. Our teachers and textbooks have failed to state the obvious negative history along with the positive history that has happened in the US thus shrinking us down to merely a part of history rather than history itself. Along with the Banking Concept of teaching we are doomed to continue to stay oppressed in our “land of the free” if we are not allowed to analyze and critically think about the true history of this

A beautifully decorated yet undermined historical figure. The teaching of American History does not only leave out the bad parts of history yet the extreme or less socially accepted acts, hence Hellen Keller. We all know what she was, deaf and blind, she learned to read, write and speak as well as graduating from college. Hellen Keller was born in 1880 and dies in 1968 as James W. Loewen states in Lies My Teacher Told Me there is about 60 years of her life that we don’t know about. Hellen Keller is portrayed merely as a tame woman who overcame her disability rather than the radical socialist and humanitarian she was. Hellen Keller was part of many movements, women's suffrage and helping found the American Civil Liberties Union. To only celebrate her as a woman overcoming great feats as a disabled person is truly to give much less acknowledgment to all that she worked and fought for. She researched blindness finding that it was “concentrated on the lower class” (Loewen, 14) men blinded in industrial jobs and prostitutes from syphilitic blindness. This is a great example of someone who has been “dumbed down” in our history. Hellen Keller was so much more than just a woman who overcame two disabilities she was a radical socialist in the early 1900's! She proved to be much more in our history than she is given praise for. Maybe because US government would prefer we only know the prim, woman who overcame life’s challenges