About twenty years ago I had a discussion with a retired couple from Cornwall, England. They lived in a tiny village owned by Prince Charles (now King Charles III) Somehow we got into students having to know the long list of Kings and Queens. We don’t teach the line of 47 Presidents in schools and we should.

            Perhaps some history classes in some schools may teach an unsanitized history of the United States with all the warts and abscesses. My classes in high school and college (29 semester hours of history) in the 1960s skipped or whitewashed the terrible things we have done to people in what will become the most powerful country in the world.

            Outside studies have shown me we killed at least eighteen of the twenty million people that lived here when the first Europeans arrived. We locked up all the people with Japanese ancestry in concentration camps in the northern plains states. They lost their homes, businesses, and some their bank accounts. Confederate Irregular General Nathan Bedford Forrest is credited with starting the Ku Klux Klan. Like minded Southerners killed thousands of non-white people.

            We are responsible for the deaths of over one hundred thousand Indian children from across the country in schools. The schools were to make them into white people by destroying their culture, their language, cutting their hair and teaching them the Christian Religion.

            Students need to learn those people who started our quest for independence were not always the pinnacle of honesty and morality. Only about twenty percent of us supported independence, about the same number wanted to stay English with the rest not caring.

            Today’s situation would seem less of a problem if students understood we are getting better than we were. Ignorance is not a blessing.