Letter to the Editor
School systems sugarcoat history
Nambia 1904, 75,000 eliminated; Turkey 1915, 1.5 million killed; Ukraine
1932, 6 million casualties; China 1937, 370,000 die; Cambodia 1979, 1.6
million dead; Guatemala 1982, 20,000 murdered; Rwanda 1994, 1 million
slaughtered; Bosnia 1995 8,000 deaths.
The only atrocities I learned about in school were the 6 million Jews
in Hitler’s death camps and the countless Indians who were wiped
out in the new world. None of these other events with such terrible death
tolls attached to them were even so much as mentioned in any class I had
ever taken in school.
I learned about the rape of Nanking from the History Channel. The Khmer
Rouge from the movie “The Killing Fields.” Hotel Rwanda showed
me what happened in Rwanda, and the Armenian Genocide I had to piece together
from articles in The Collegian.
I went to a public school, so I cannot say that it really surprises me
that I failed to learn a few important historical incidents, but I doubt
that people who went to private school learned about these incidents either.
Either way, I really feel stupid when incidents of obvious historical
importance seem to come out of the blue to me when I’m 20 years
old.
Obviously, these events are not nice, or pretty, or pleasant, but a lot
of history is ugly and painful. I just think that these historical events
deserve at the very, very least a footnote in a textbook or five minutes
of a lecture, just to mention them, so that I can look them up myself.
—Brandon Hamilton
Junior, biology
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