I find it hard to talk about this without becoming irritated, in all honesty. Waters attempts desperately to straddle the line between collegiate, injustice-focused narrative (since he claims this is curriculum common to most colleges, one must wonder how unique the Jesuit tradition really is in this case) and the public school docrtine designed to preserve or encourage the growth of patriotism in young Americans.
Forgive me if I my arguments diverge a bit from the paper, but there is a bit of hypocrisy inherent in what he says. I can hardly blame the government for encouraging a curriculum which will make youth more patriotic to it--without such cultural inoculation, after all, a country can only fall to pieces, and whatever problems I have with the American government I'm actually quite fond of it--but I can certainly blame Waters for trying to make it seem 'correct'. It is not correct: it is elementary learning bordering on propaganda designed to encourage values and ideals in the youth.
And that's fine, frankly. I can accept that. It's what needs to happen: it's what every nation that encourages freedom of speech and freedom of the intellect will do in order to maintain a nationalistic group. But Waters attempt to reconcile them, even through his examples of the evolution of our perception of history, strikes me as fundamentally empty. It is an attempt to be original in a system that is, to a certain degree, stagnant: learning unambiguous, American history in which we are constantly progressing to greater and greater heights from an already illustrious past and then learning the history of a complex and often ethically uncertain nation. The conflict exists, and trying to reconcile it is simply a failed attempt to be original.
Though he does make an insightful point when talking about college classrooms as the 'testing ground' for otherwise subordinate ideas, this point almost contradicts his earlier argument: the ambiguous, ethically treacherous ideas of which history is composed are ignored and the college classroom made the standard. If so, shouldn't classrooms on all levels undergo a constant trend towards complexity? Waters meanders in his own argument: his ideas do not hold together cohesively.
The History of public schools (at least through seventh grade--I don't recall many 'lies' being cast my way once I hit 8th) is designed to maintain national pride. The only evolution they undergo is an evolution towards greater justification--a point Waters makes and one I agree with. What, then, was Waters point? Why write at all? There is a wrong version of history: it's the one which doesn't disclose all the facts.
The greatest sins a historian can commit is plagiarism or intentional failure to disclose relevant information. The history of the young is basically propaganda, and for a good reason: but simply because a good reason is present does not make that history 'right'.
