Keep questioning everything

I wanted to say a few words about a man who inspired me to challenge the status quo. My father often was the one telling me to do so but it was a book he gave that pushed me to do so. I had to do a report on Christopher Columbus for school. It was mid eighties and I didn't want to just use the schools textbook.

My father handed me a copy of A People's History of the United States. As I read, it was hard to believe that the man we are taught to idolize had committed such atrocities. Discovering that Columbus didn't come in peace, I was determined to prove otherwise. I went directly to the diary of the man himself.

Needless to say, I was dumbfounded. He told his journal about the tricks he used on his crew. He spoke of the people he first encountered, the now extinct Arawaks, as though they we not human. He spoke of how he exploited the people in search of gold. This was not the man I was taught about in elementary school.

There are probably a few teachers I had that might have wished that this didn't happen to me. I say this because I challenge not just myself but my educators as well. I wasn't a misbehaving pupil but I refused to regurgitate what I came to see as propaganda. I now give the credit to my father for teaching me this, after all, he is the one who put the book in my hand. But it was Howard Zinn's approach to teaching history that made me critical.