Lies My Teachers Told Me

The falsification of the past, Orwell’s memory hole, is everywhere in history classes. Palestinian children ae apparently taught that  Palestine was until recently always Muslim. Palestinian Christian children, whose ancestors were there long before Islam, are taught they come from Europe. And Canadian children are taught they burned down the White House. 

But not just in history classes. He who controls the past controls the future. And he who controls the present controls the past… And those in power seem never able to resist the temptation to control. They are in power largely because they crave power.

Philosophy classes neglect everything between the ancient Greeks and the Renaissance, not to mention the world beyond Europe. I had to full in thousand-year gaps on my own.

And I went all the way through grad school assuming that poets always burned out in youth. What actually happens is that poets, as they mature, like most of us of healthy interests, turn from sex and politics to religion. Eliot, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Auden, Donne, Blake … their best work is often suppressed in the modern academy, as if an embarrassment.

Also suppressed is the fact that most prominent scientists over the long run of history were religious. Copernicus who discovered heliocentrism, LeMaitre who discovered the Big Bang, Mendel who discovered genetics, Isaac Newton, Wallace, co-discoverer of evolution … actually pretty much all of them, up to perhaps the middle of the 19th century. The fact that be basic premise of science, that the material world is intelligible and follows laws, is religious, is also suppressed.

In history, the schools slander and misrepresent the Crusades, the Inquisition, the witch-burnings, the “Dark” and Middle Ages, the “patriarchy.” They invent out of nothing an age of innocence and sexual equality before the coming of the book. By emphasizing the exceptions, they give the false impression that religion over history has fostered rather than prevented conflict.

In Canadian history, they systematically misrepresent the relations between the “settler” population and the indigenous people as one of conflict. They misrepresent the intent of the early Christian missionaries; and, strikingly, the nature and intent of the residential schools.

The broad general conclusion that can be taken from all these examples is that the powers that be in our system are systematically trying to suppress and discredit Catholicism in particular; Christianity more broadly; and religion in general.

This is what comes from the secularization of the education system. Secularization is not neutral. It is necessarily anti-religious.

The solution is a return to denominational schools and denominational universities, as used to be the standard world-wide. Each may have its biases; but at least, in the wider society, they should cancel each other out.