The above thesis can best be illustrated with one image: Christopher Columbus. Nowhere else in American History textbooks has there been a person whose impact on school children has been so complete, so devastatingly accepted, and so horribly wrong. When I was in grade school, my class was required to do a report on a famous explorer. I chose Roald Amundsen. I was the only one who did not choose Christopher Columbus or Eric the Red. While this anecdote seemingly has little to do with my thesis, it in fact illustrates it in two parts. One, many of the school children in my class were too lazy and uninspired to come up with another explorer, and two, they didn’t know any better.

There is, of course, a reason that over three quarters of the other fourth graders chose Columbus; they were bred to. From the moment a child is enrolled in elementary school, their brain is hammered with images of a jolly, noble sailor whose genocidal exploits, as Howard Zinn writes, are "quietly accepted" by the masses. Of course, the grade school teachers do not tell little Billy that Columbus raped and killed dozens of Arawak females. No, the teacher tells Billy that Columbus was a grand man, an explorer and a philosopher who knew that the world was round, and who discovered America. However, at a certain point in my scholastic career, I was told that everything that my fourth grade teacher Mrs. Dodson told me was a lie. Columbus, as we all know by now, did very few of the things that we were told he did. He was not the commander of a grandiose fleet of skilled sailors. He was sent on a decided suicide mission with a crew of Spanish convicts, who were wont to mutiny on occasion. As Zinn tells us, in the grade school version of pre-colonial America, "there is no bloodshed, and Columbus Day is a celebration." To America’s education system, there is apparently nothing wrong with telling an eight year old that a man who rapes, pillages and murders is as mighty a hero as a person could be. Is it not a societal sin to tell a lie to a child if it would crush his or her imagination? Perhaps it is, if the lie has nothing to do with Christianity or History. Despite the fact that I cannot see how lying to a child about the existence of a fat man who rides around on reindeer, breaking into houses is any more acceptable than telling Billy that he is a stupid child, and car does start with the letter C.

But when it comes time to teach the grade schoolers, our friend Billy is shown a picture of friendly United States military men helping the gleeful and smiling Indians move their belongings from their homeland, which was shown as being burnt to the ground, to a happier, greener place. Well, yes, the homeland the Indians once held was burnt, Billy. But that is because the soldiers set fire to it.

The last major example of how scholasticism’s historical focus changes is illustrated in Zinn’s chapter, "A Kind of Revolution." The reason that Zinn titles this chapter as such lies in the definition of the word revolution, which is "a complete change." In the American Revolution, the only change that was made was that of the people in power; from the upper class white male in England, to the upper class white male in the United States. Even still, little Billy’s teacher again reads him a story about how England was so unbearably tyrannical toward all of the colonists that they simply had to break away. Now, I would think that this would be incredibly confusing to a child. Here we had England and the United States going throat to throat, yet, two hundred years later, they are the best of friends.

Furthermore, the history books portray the colonial soldiers are well disciplined, armed, fed and trained, when none of these characteristics can truthfully be attributed to them. They were a rag-tag grouping of young men, drunk men and family men, whose primary armaments were simply what a colonist happened to own. There was no colonial uniform, no field-training regimen, and the highest-ranking officers were the people who held the highest offices, and who controlled the most land. These colonial "soldiers" were fighting against real soldiers who fought under the command of a person who held one of –if not the- the highest offices in the world, and who controlled perhaps the largest plot of land in the world as well. It would appear to me that the colonists were fighting against higher classed versions of themselves, so that their superiors could then switch places with the British rulers at the top of the American hierarchy. The American Revolution simply allowed for the typical colonist to harvest crops for a person with whom he shared an accent.

Rewritings of historical events such as these are made for the sake of little Billy’s fragile misconception of history and life, teachers have done, and still do an excellent job of obscuring the truth and painting a picture with rainbows and hearts, when there should only be foreboding shades of gray.