Parents should be mad if their children are taught about Christopher Columbus in a similar fashion to the way they were taught. Visions of happy Native Americans dancing with explorers around fires, sharing food and drink and just learning to coexist filled the heads of children all over the United States. Only years after elementary school, when children started being capable of independently researching things they learned in school will children realize that Columbus was not the man teachers typically made him out to be. Children should become increasingly wary about Columbus.

It is important to seek out different viewpoints, not just the “white Christian savior to the heathen natives” archetype. Do not allow the future leaders of America to conform to the ideas that Columbus somehow helped the people of the nation.

People should be appalled to figure out the things white “colonists” did to men, women and children who only offered peace. The kindness of the natives was truly stepped on; something that may never be appropriately “fixed”. For this reason, among many others, Columbus Day should not be observed in schools.

People who are capable of thinking by themselves should reserve every right to celebrate the holiday, but please, think about the children. Children typically take the things their teachers say as cold, solid fact. Kids are incredibly susceptible to the ideas of those older than them.

To idolize this one man as an American hero of sorts is to idolize the things Columbus deemed necessary. Why aren’t more parents mad about a murderer being embedded into the curriculum their kids are going over? Sure, an Islamophobic mother can go viral after being so worked up about her “Christian child” learning the very basics of another religion, but no one will protest an entire Holiday to commemorate genocide.

What’s wrong here? Are people so caught up in the idea of an old-fashioned God loving America that they don’t care about ensuring kids can think for themselves? Future and current teachers of America, think long and hard before you teach about Columbus, or at least teach from the perspective of natives as well. You never know, you could be breeding the next spice trading, bad-at-navigation homicidal “hero”. Now wouldn’t that make you feel guilty, or are you going to wait hundreds of years after idolizing this kind of behavior to stop and think “Hey. This is kinda messed up.”