America's Progress

What is progress?  How exactly do we define it?  Not only should we look at we value as progress, we should look at how others value it.  After all, another man's trash is another man's treasure and in America, we sure do like to label others as "trash."  Sure we don't call them trash, we use other adjectives: primitive, uncivilized, third-world country, etc.

In history classes, I was always under the impression that we were learning history to help us in the future, but I guess that was not the case, looking back.  History is simply there to tell us the facts and for us to memorize the rights and wrongs that the country has decided upon, not for us to make our own inferences through multiple sources.  America's long standing tale of history is a tale of progress.  Textbooks stay on this even with issues that are obviously not progress by categorizing them under the umbrella of America working for the common good.  We are often left oblivious to circumstances surrounding events.  The rest of the world is left mocking us, and we never know why.

A few events that have gotten in the way of America's continual progress, as discussed by Loewen:
-Enviromentalism: textbooks typically imply that the environmental crisis was taken care of by the government; however, they fail to mention current issues that have continued past the government's initial reaction.
-Religion: President Lincoln was the last non-Christian to take office.  Our society has become less tolerant even though we do not like to acknowledge this.
-Ignorance in past societies' lives has allowed us to believe that a longer life is part of progress; however, people of the America's lived very long lives before Europeans brought diseases, thus there is a fluctuation on the timeline.

If the textbook had its say, we would constantly be getting better in all aspects, "from race relations to transportation."  I sure wish this was a reality, but there is always a demon and we must understand where it came from and why to understand the problem.  In reality, what seems to be a problem to us, might not always be a problem to the rest of the world. With our self-centered ethnocentrism, we are less tolerant to other cultures and desire for everyone to fit into our mold.  Teachers, we must challenge our students to think about history in order to make it relevant (aka not boring) to our students! Think of the possibilities of what your history class might look like if you take me up on this suggestion.