BoredCaitlin, Jameson

“...there no longer does seem to be any organic relationship between the American history we learn from the schoolbooks and the lived experience of the current multinational, high-rise, stagflated city of the newspapers and our own daily life” (Jameson 418)
What this quote tells me is that the relationship between what we see in reality and what we are told in school can be drastically different. The version of history we are taught in school is presented from an extremely biased point of view. How many of us were taught that Christopher Columbus “discovered” America? How many of us questioned what we were told back then? There is very little, if any, relation between what we’re told and what actually happened. When we’re constantly told something when we’re young, we rarely question it. Usually, when we grow up, reality hits us like bricks and a lot of the things we think we know turn out to be total bollocks. We realize that are the products of our surroundings and the things we are taught, and not everything we were taught was always correct. In the case of history, we were told what our schools wanted us to think. Instead of being presented with an accurate version of history with multiple viewpoints, we were presented with a biased and whitewashed single point of view.