Textbooks Lie

When we read a textbook, we assume it is fact.  We take what we read and don't question it.  We are taught from a very young age that America is the best country to live in.  Obviously, people have more rights in America than in many other countries, but the way the schools teach us is bias.  Looking at how a US History textbook describes WWII is very different than how a textbook in Germany would describe the war.  We read our textbooks and take the information in it as fact, often not taking the biases into account.  Usually these textbooks paint Americans in a better light than other nations. Instead of seeing an objective view of both sides, we only are shown our side of the story.

Not only how an event is described in a textbook is biased, but what information is in the textbook is biased.  Not every event from history can be in a textbook.  This being said, many important parts of history are barely mentioned or not mentioned at all.  Many US History textbooks don't include the start of our nations history, when we essentially wiped out an entire population of Native Americans and took their land.  Often times accounts of WWII include the horrors of concentration camps in Europe, but barely have anything about the internment camps that we had in the United States.  And isn't it convenient how most textbooks don't mention the "Gulf of Tonkin Incident" which was a fake incident that justified Lyndon B. Johnson to enter Vietnam?

Next time you are reading a textbook, think about who wrote it and who the intended audience is.  Though we can learn a lot from textbooks, they must be looked at with speculation because it is nearly impossible for it to be unbiased.