By Brandon Holmes

The young minds of Massachusetts are being corrupted.

At a young age the children of Massachusetts are being taught to celebrate the achievements of Columbus and the Pilgrims. Growing up I believed that Columbus was the explorer that found America and that the Pilgrims were nice people that came to America and lived side by side with the Native Americans. Why was I taught this way? I blame the Massachusetts History and Social Science Curriculum Framework.

The Massachusetts History and Social Science Curriculum Framework is a document that is given to teachers in the state. It supplies them with the things that must be taught to children depending on the grade they teach. 3rd grade teachers are told to teach about New England and Massachusetts, and 5th grade teachers are told to teach about Pre-Columbian civilization of the new world along with European exploration and colonization.

I'm a 16-year-old high school student who is currently studying the history of the Americas and the Massachusetts Framework. While studying the Americas, my class had come to find that many of the facts that we knew about Columbus and the Pilgrims were either false or one-sided. This led us to the framework, the base of our early education. It also led us to ask why we were taught this way.

While looking over parts of the framework I have come to find that it can be extremely ambiguous. In regards to Columbus and the Pilgrims, the framework doesn't instruct teachers to cover the interactions between the explorers and the indigenous people of the Americas. This lack of information along with the material used to teach children can be crucial to the image painted of Columbus and the Pilgrims.

The framework states that 3rd grade students must be able to identify the Wampanoags and their leaders at the time the Pilgrims arrived, and describe their way of life. It also wants students to be able to identify who the Pilgrims were and explain why they left Europe to seek religious freedom; describe their journey and their early years in the Plymouth colony. That stuff's all fine and dandy, but the framework says nothing about teaching the children about how the two groups interacted and coexisted. It leaves out all the juicy stuff that makes the Pilgrim story real. The Pilgrims did a lot of killing, but not many people know about that.

In regards to the 5th graders the framework says that they should be able to identify the three major pre-Columbian civilizations that existed in central and South America and their locations. It wants the students to be able to identify at least four explorers from a list of nine, one of them being Christopher Columbus. The students must also know what they were searching for, what they found and how their discovery changed the image of the world. When I was in the 5th grade this kind of material put me to sleep. Yeah it's important, but where's the reality? History is full of action and I feel like it's slowly being drained by our school systems.

The framework doesn't even require teachers to teach about Christopher Columbus. It focuses on exploration in general, but not specifically on the man we celebrate each year for his"achievements".

As I stated before, while growing up I thought that Columbus was this great man that discovered America, and the Pilgrims were these people that came from England and lived with Native Americans. But now I know more about their true stories.

I now know that Columbus didn't discover America. He accidentally landed himself in the Caribbean thinking it was India. He was no hero but a murderer. With the help of his men, he wiped out an entire population of people in search of gold. I see now that Columbus was a truly sick man. In his journal you can see his thirst for gold, and his lack of caring for the lives of the natives.

I also know that the Pilgrims didn't live so peacefully with the natives of this land. They, like Columbus, were killers and hungry for land. They would put smallpox on blankets and give them to Natives as gifts. They used disease and war to kill off Natives so they could move west.

The purpose of this is not to bash Columbus or the pilgrims, or to judge their actions; it's too late for that. I'm writing this to question the way that the children of Massachusetts are taught, and the way the teachers are told to teach. I'd rather be served a four course meal of juicy historical facts, than a bowl of dry stories.

I don't think that the Massachusetts framework is all bad. I just think that it can be a tad ambiguous. I also believe that if the teachers are not required to teach the whole story of Columbus and the Pilgrims, or history in general they shouldn't teach it at all. Wait until the children are older to tell them all the gruesome truths about Columbus and the Pilgrims if they are too young. Don't place these one-sided images in their minds of false heroes.

The writer, Brandon Holmes, is a 16 year-old student at Codman Academy Charter Public High School.