A few weeks ago, on Columbus Day as it happens, I was getting my kids ready for bed and decided to ask them what they’d talked about in school. The holiday came up, and my third-grade daughter jumped in right away.
“Oh yeah, Columbus! He’s a bad guy. He abused the native people,” she said with the excitement of somebody who’s just learned a juicy new fact.
Where’d you hear that? I asked her. “The librarian told us!” she replied, proudly.
I don’t really want to litigate Christopher Columbus in this space. He’s a complicated figure, like every human being who’s ever lived. He did heroic things and things that aren’t so admirable. That’s actually the norm when it comes to historical figures; Moses murdered a man, after all.
As adults, we can argue about all of that, and we should. But that’s not really what this is about.
What stuck with me that night was a different question: What do we want kids who aren’t ready for nuance to hear first about their own country?
