History
As I started to mention earlier, there are many limitations on our understanding of history. There are the simpler problems with compiling evidence or understanding what occurred in the past, and then there are additional problems with presenting history, or educating about it. I’ll try to focus on the latter.
To start, when I have conflicting accounts of an event, how would I teach people about the event at school or college? Do I just teach the account I believe to be correct, thus not allowing my students to learn any counter argument (how you would actually determine which account is correct at all is a topic for another time)? I would argue that teaching this way would be quite a shame, as I think it’s important that we are all reminded of challenges to established or popular ideas. This motivates people to develop and understand their own stances, as well as criticize other opinions. Yet this is usually the way younger children are taught history because it’s simpler to understand.
You might say that the obvious solution is to feature both accounts, but if I try to feature all critical accounts of a situation, learning history would be very confusing and it would be difficult to progress anywhere. Meeting every statement with a series of oppositional remarks would make this process extremely time-consuming and inconclusive, but maybe this method is better because maybe that’s how history should be or really is. I’m not sure.
There’s also an additional conflict in that people are educated in history by the government (for the most part). There is reasonable concern that the state will force people to learn misinformation or narratives that suit its best interests. Some philosophers have suggested that it would be more desirable to have many different private schools, where the government merely funds the ability of all children to go to these schools. This would attempt to separate history from the country where that history is being taught.
So these are some of the realities of how history is presented in schools. Some perspectives inevitably have to be omitted for the sake of time (and convenience in some cases), so we’ll never get a complete picture. My greatest advice on interpreting history is this: be suspicious of stories where there are only good guys vs bad guys. The truth is most likely more complicated than that; there are likely good and bad guys on both sides, and someone may be trying to manipulate the narrative in post. As I said in my book, other people’s interests often don’t align with yours, so you’ll want to ask good questions in service of your goals, because other people won’t be asking them for you. This applies to history as much as anything else: try to ask yourself who was right, because the government or your teacher may have an incentive to promote a simpler or alternate explanation than the real truth.