Blog: Why Objective History Matters.

Last weekend, I went to a public high school to take my ACT test. As someone who has been homeschooled her entire life, it was my first and last time ever being inside a public school and overall, I was largely unimpressed by it. But I’m not here to talk about that or to talk about the ACT and how that went. I want to focus on the sign that my dad and I saw going into the school which said: “History is just a lie we all agree on.”

Remember guys, this is a public high school. And while I don’t want to go into specifics about which one this was for security reasons, let’s just say it was a very prestigious school that’s known as one of the best in the country. So why would they have a sign up saying that history is just a socially accepted lie?

Well, the main reason for this is because rights are easier to take away from you when you’re stupid, particularly when you don’t understand history. The study of history is possibly one of the most important subjects you can teach a child because it is the compass for the future. A knowledge of history allows a person to understand the world around them, why it is the way it is, and gives them the ability to draw parallels between the events of today and the events of the past. Being able to do this is how one avoids making disasterous mistakes.

However, this can only be done if the history being taught is objective fact. It cannot be something you only think happened. History must be taught from the lens of the people who lived it and must be supported by credible sources. For example, without the writings of people like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and others, I wouldn’t know how America came to be. I wouldn’t know what the War for Independence was or that it even happened. I could tell you absolutely nothing factual about it. But because we have the accounts of these people and their contemporaries, we know exactly what happened.

This cannot be said for history being taught from the viewpoint of post-modern relativism. If it is just a lie, then you can make up anything you want, even if it never happened and there’s nothing to support it. For example, if you’re a Leftist reading this, then by following the logic (or lack thereof) of this post-modern viewpoint, slavery never happened, racism wasn’t a thing, Karl Marx never existed, Hitler never existed, discrimination against the LGBTQ+ community never happened…I could go on.

Do you see how dumb that sounds? Of course, what I listed off there is all false and we have the evidence to prove it as such. But if all of history is a lie that’s socially accepted, then what’s to stop me from making up a different lie and getting enough people to agree with me to shift the narrative? What makes one side any better than another for teaching a heavily revised version of history, such as we see in Ken Burn’s infamous new documentary?

The only way that history should be taught is by relying on objectivity. If objective history is not taught to students, then you are teaching them a lie and depriving them of their most fundamental right of freedom of thought. You deprive them of knowledge that could stop them from repeating the mistakes of the past.

Until next time,

M.J.