December 6, 2002
For a while now I've been kicking an idea around in the back of my head. It all got started after I read Lies My Teacher Told Me and Lies Across America.
The basic premise of the books is that the teaching of history in American schools is horribly flawed. Facts are left out for fear of offending various groups, and anything that doesn't show a steady upward climb is for the most part left out (don't want the kiddies to get demoralized). Historic events are also depicted as happening in a vacuum -- if the Vietnam War is covered at all, it's assumed to start with the U.S. sending soldiers in the early '60s, not the French colonization in the first half of the 20th century -- which makes everything seem random and disjoint. To top it all off, it's boring as all hell. Students plod through a morass of dates and names, and don't actually learn anything. The result is an overwhelming apathy towards American history, and the prospect of not learning anything from our collective mistakes over the last 500-plus years.
So because I have tons of time on my hands, and Loewen (the books' author) planted the idea in my head, I want to write an American history book that might actually be useful. My only problems are my writing ability -- or more my lack thereof -- and my unwillingness to do the research necessary for the job. This couldn't be a 7-page high-school research paper where I borrowed three books from the library and wrote it over a weekend. It would involve months, maybe years, of research to get us from the late 1400s up to now, and would probably involve libraries across the country as a base to really do it right. And to top that all off, it would have to be edited down to about 600 pages to be able to be covered in a typical 180-day school year.
It could be done, sure, but I don't think I'd be willing to see it through to completion once I got into the hard stuff. So here I sit with this great idea, and I'm unwilling to even try. God I suck.
