this post was submitted on 30 May 2025
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Lol some of these comments are completely ignoring the reality of why it was phrased this way. Its a textbook for school children probably below the age of 10. Do you really expect middle school public education teachers to explain genocide and ethnic clensing to eight year olds? They slowly introduce the truth come highschool when kids are older because its horrific and toddlers have no need for their childhood to be ruined with horrific adult truths. Weren't you allowed to believe pilgrims and Indians cam e together for Thanksgiving for a few years of your childhood?
No because I'm native american and was confronted with the reality of genocide and ethnic cleansing everyday
White children can handle it too
Most white adults can't handle it because of this.
"The European colonists forced the native population off of their land" is plenty understandable to a small child
I was also allowed to believe that gay people wanted to rape me and that farm animals live long happy lives out in meadows. Who the fuck benefits from children being lied to?
I can remember it, the lies I was told as a child have turned me into a very cynical adult who has serious issues trusting anyone about just about anything...
Abuse & molestation need to be managed by a professional.
However, the truth is true regardless. "Innocence" & "protection" with lies & deception are mostly rationalizations some adults throw around to make it easier for them to handle their discomfort with truth around children. For their own protection, children are better off knowing taboo subjects, especially what to do when someone touches them wrong.
When my parents would tell me the unvarnished truth, they hadn't undermined their credibility & I knew I could approach them about anything. We'd have rewarding discussions.
You don't need to bring up painful memories or lie about them either. You don't need to tell them anything. You can simply love & care.
Thinking impersonal truths about objective reality (rather than intimate, painful memories) should diminish enjoyment of life is a limited, misguided perspective: they don't have to.
I appreciate your input, and I apologize for dogpiling. Not telling your daughter what happened to her is absolutely the right choice, but I do not think it's equivalent to instilling disinformation about the treatment of native populations in the Americas. Omitting the awful particular details is good, no child should know what rape and murder are, but we aren't just doing that—we're teaching our kids that "it's fine actually, the settlers and the native populations were best friends!" It contributes to a widespread ignorance of the New World's history well into adulthood.
Yes.
It really isn't that hard. "The European colonists forced the native population off their land." You can spare the rape and murder until the kids are older, but don't just outright lie to them
I did my best to explain slavery to my daughter when she was 6 because due to COVID, we were basically home schooling her...
Yeah, middle school is literally where it was hammered in for me. I think around ~4th grade we started to get some more serious "We treated the Native Americans really poorly", but I remember very starkly from 6th grade on that we got a pretty robust view of the historical-scale resolution of the genocides, even though they weren't referred to as such. Invasions, broken treaties, massacres, and backstabbing.
Better than the washed-down history I got, which made it dull & pointless: why do they think children like to draw boring pilgrims or waste mindspace on insipid, antiquated shit drained of all significance?
A minor exception was elementary school lessons on the holocaust & genocide by the Nazis. They showed us death camps, piles of shoes, masses of corpses, read & played Anne Frank's diary, and they invited survivors to speak & show their tattoos. An odd point was when they showed photos of Nazi artifacts made from human remains & asked how that made us feel: some kids (recalling an earlier lesson treating native americans positively for resourcefully using every part of the animal) were confused & drew comparisons.
Then what, explain why we dont actually give the land back because nobody actually cares outside of virtue signaling?
Where's the hard part?
Don't explain, "I don't know", or "ask them" goes far. Better than telling garbage to unlearn.
I hate opinions like this. It pretends that children are too stupid to understand reality. Children are generally far more intelligent and capable of understanding things than people give them credit for. They just need it to be explained to them.
The reason this is an issue is because it creates this idea that it was mutual, and ingrains a mythos that makes it harder to learn the truth later. Sure, you can coddle them and let them believe everything was happy and peaceful as children, but that's how you end up with adults who believe America doesn't have horrors in its past and we were a pure and moral nation. It creates a conservative ideology where things were perfect before and we shouldn't change or try to fix issues.
Yeah, and it made learning the truth all the more horrific.
What other atrocities should we entirely reverse so as to have a 'pure' childhood?
Maybe we can whitewash Hitler, have Churchill and FDR swap cigars in Munich with him.
In US, curriculum's are different from state to state. SOME children eventually receive the truth, and having learned the truth realize they were lied to by their educators and lose trust in the education system. Other children never learn the truth, and instead argue that there was no genocide because thats what they were taught in school. If the country is willing to make bombs that get dropped on children around the world, then surely we can drop a few truth bombs on our own children.
I see where your coming from but I don't think whitewashing it is the answer...they could've just stated where the settlements were and that native people were displaced it doesn't have to say anything about genocide and can just cover that aspect of it later.
This just sets the wrong framework for the later education your talking about