
Reclaiming History: The Pilgrims
There is perhaps no other person or group of people so grossly misrepresented in American History as the Pilgrims (unless it’s Christopher Columbus). Modern historians describe for us their greed and lust, their domination, and their zealous forcing of religion on everyone around them. We are made to feel guilty for descending from them, and reaping the rewards of the nation for which they laid the foundations. Modern historians would have us believe that the Indians were weak, helpless natives overrun by tyrannical, greedy Englishmen bent on conquering the vast American wilderness. Ah, but then there’s the truth.
So, do you know the truth? Do your children know the truth? How did you learn what you know? How do your children learn what they know? How can you learn the truth?
20th and 21st century historians have invested a great deal of time in what is called “revisionist history;” that is, changing the story of great people and civilizations to fit what they think happened and why they believe it did or did not happen, or telling what they think should have happened. There is a definite bias, and the divide is right down the middle between Christians and non-Christians.
In a recent article entitled “Academic Standards Promoting Islam Invaded America’s Classrooms”, Dr. Susan berry states:
With regard to world history, [Donna Hearne, former Reagan official in the U.S. Department of Education] says as far back as the 1930s there was a movement to collect and write curricula that would be hostile to America. The Frankfurt School– which was the source of Critical Theory – was developed with the goal of advancing Marxist philosophy in Germany. Following the Nazi takeover, the FrankfurtSchool eventually moved to New York and Columbia University.
- There is a definite revision of history, especially American, taught to our public school children today.
- The use of “supplemental resources” (websites, professional workshops, etc.) excludes history curriculum from scrutiny and oversight because no two school districts or history teachers are presenting material in the same way.
- Large numbers of history teachers are actually not trained to teach history, leaving them to accept any instructional materials for their classroom use without verifying the facts.
But most of its specimens share these features: under the guise of heightening teachers’ and students’ awareness of previously marginalized groups, they manipulate teachers (and, thus, their pupils) to view the history of freedom as the history of oppression and to be more sympathetic to cultures that don’t value individual rights than to those that do.
People can also teach themselves history, pick it up from their reading, the History Channel, even movies. The key is to insist that, however they learn it, tomorrow’s teachers must know it—and demonstrate this—before confronting children in the classroom.
The source of the problem with many of the supplemental resources used for history or social studies is the ideological mission of the organizations that create them. Their ostensible goal is to combat intolerance, expand students’ knowledge of other cultures, give them other “points of view” on commonly studied historical phenomena, and/or promote “critical thinking.” But their real goal, to judge by an analysis of their materials and the effects they have on teachers, is to influence how children come to understand and think about current social and political issues by bending historical content to those ends.
The purpose of the 1994 [Facing History and Ourselves] resource book, bearing the same title as the 1982 manual but with a new conceptual framework, is to make sure that students see the task of confronting white racism in America as the chief reason for studying the Holocaust.6 It makes explicit and frequent comparisons not only between twentieth-century America and twentieth-century Germany but also between nineteenth century America and nineteenth-century Germany. In essence, it uses the Holocaust to portray America’s blacks as Europe’s Jews, thereby reducing genocide to an act of bigotry and equating white Americans to Nazis.
We do know, though, that teachers have been increasingly encouraged by their professional organizations to use videos of television programs or films in their classes to compensate for the inability of many high school students to read their history textbooks or primary documents with adequate comprehension.
The daily lives and fates of the many Native American tribes have been perhaps the greatest beneficiary of this sociocultural approach, which now occupies much instructional time. With it, however, comes a strongly negative view of the Europeans who explored and colonized the Americas. Supplemental resources now guide teachers to downplay or ignore altogether what students should be learning about the origins and development of our civic culture.
Appendix C contains the most manipulative set of teacher-created lessons I saw. It has not one academic objective. Instead of “The Wampanoag,” the lessons could have been titled “How to Cultivate Hatred of the Pilgrims.” The teacher clearly intends to make sure her students end up with no “misconceptions” about the Pilgrims, even grading them for parroting the politically correct response. What is especially chilling about this lesson was that not one teacher in the group saw anything remarkable about it. None raised a question about the flagrantly loaded nature of the quiz questions, at least while I was present.
Click HERE to read Part Two.
Thank you for taking the time to share this. It is a rare and informative confession that "both sides" are repainting history in a methodically deceptive light. My children are still young, so I haven't figured out how to present primary sources in a way that they will be able to grasp, but I very much want to give them a foundation of facts. I'm looking forward to your list of resources.
I am so glad to have found this blog! I will be sharing it with everyone that could use a history lesson. I suppose that means Everyone!
I am interested to read the rest of your posts, but I am concerned if you are only using source documents that tell one side of the story. The pilgrims' writings are not going to paint themselves in a bad light… where are the rebuttals from the Native Americans of that day? There aren't any, correct? So it seems that it will be very difficult to get a true, fair picture of history.
On another note, I am 35. I only learned good things about the Pilgrims, and a mixture of good and bad about the Native Americans, in a public School. I think NOW children are being taught Anti-American history, but I certainly wasn't 20-30 years ago.
Your concern is very common. However, it is a recent (historically) concern. I'll try to address it, but you may not like what I have to say.
First of all, you're right. The Indians didn't leave source documents, so there is no way to refute what the Pilgrims said. However, there are TONS of writings of these Plymouth Puritans. If you read their sermons, letters, and pamphlets you will see that they strove with all their hearts to treat their fellow man with love, fairness, and compassion. They strove to please God in everything they said and did. This leads me to trust their story. For example, there is an incident where they discovered several bushels of buried corn in an abandoned area (later discovered to be the former home of Squanto and his people), and this discovery came at a time when they were desperately hungry. When they eventually brought in their own harvest, they sought high and low to discover to whom they could repay that corn. They DID treat the Indians fairly.
We live in a time that wants to coddle victims and make all stories fair. The thing is, history is a tale of real events, not a fairy tale with a moral to the story. There are unpleasantries. In the case of the Plymouth Pilgrims, you have about the least violent founding of a new culture in a new land; but since the beginning of time, civilizations have fought and conquered other civilizations, some lost, some won, and it wasn't ever "fair." As I said in the above blog post, we don't need to rewrite the story to make the European white people the bad guys and the red man the good guys. Just read the history and learn from it.
Thanks for reading! Regarding presenting primary sources to young children: it's not necessary that your elementary children read the entire texts written by any historical figure. Whew! : ) What's important is that their teachers and books present the information taken from those sources accurately. As my children's teacher, I try very hard to make sure that the books we read (on all levels) present accurate facts. It does take a little more time on my part (since there are so many "opinions" out there to weed through) but it's worth it. I can present a children's book, a video, or a history lesson and say "we know this is true because William Bradford, governor of Plymouth Colony, kept very detailed records of events as they happened. Let me show you this book he wrote…" and so on.
I hope this helps!
Thank you!