Dear Millennials and Gen Z,

Can we please be the generation that finally demands better history books? And bans McGraw Hill from public education.

I’m a Zentennial , and I remember having McGraw Hill textbooks in school. Looking back at the way American history was presented to us, I honestly think we deserved better. Too much of what we were taught was grossly sanitized, simplified, and shaped by a propagandist version of the American story that is only producing idots.

And our kids deserve better than government propaganda in our classrooms.

History shouldn’t be written like a boring Disney movie. It shouldn’t turn complicated and violent chapters of American history into comforting stories that leave out the most uncomfortable facts of American ancestors.

Take colonialism in America. For generations, American students have been given a sanitized version of colonization and Thanksgiving that can make the relationship between European settlers and Indigenous peoples sound far more peaceful and mutually celebratory than the brutal historical record actually was. The genocide, displacement, broken agreements, exploitation, and destruction of Indigenous communities cannot simply be pushed into the footnotes while Thanksgiving becomes a feel-good origin story.

That isn’t education. That is bullshit and a waste of time for the youth.

And this isn’t about replacing one political agenda with another. It’s about demanding that students get the full historical record — including the parts that are uncomfortable, ugly, complicated, and inconvenient.

Our children should learn about Indigenous civilizations before European colonization. They should learn what colonization actually meant for Indigenous peoples. They should learn slavery without euphemisms. Our children should learn the brutal facts that are often reduced to a few sanitized sentences in K–12 history. They should learn that Native Americans were hunted, massacred, forcibly removed from their lands, and treated as obstacles to be eliminated. They should learn that in California, the state subsidized private and militia campaigns against Native people, authorizing the equivalent of $1.29 million in 1850s dollars for those campaigns. California’s first white us citizen governor even declared that a “war of extermination” would continue until Native people became extinct. (Governor of California)

And we should not hide the reality that there were bounty systems and rewards for killing Native people. Children should know that this was not simply a peaceful story of settlers arriving and “building America.” There was organized violence, land theft, forced labor, family separation, and deliberate destruction of Native communities. The historical record is horrifying and that is precisely why it belongs in history class.

If we are going to teach American history, then teach the damn history. Don’t turn genocide into a Thanksgiving fairy tale and don’t turn colonization into a heroic cartoon about pioneers discovering an empty continent.

And we should also protect future generations from having new forms of political propaganda spoon-fed to them in the classroom.

Look at what is happening in Texas. The state has been rewriting its social-studies standards, including curriculum that places significant emphasis on ancient Israel, biblical narratives, and Israel’s historical connections to America and Texas. Texas has also distributed educational resources dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If we are going to teach children about Israel in American history books, then teach them the whole history — including the documented violence, brutal displacement, occupation, and documented violations of international law committed against Palestinians. Teach them about the suffering of Palestinian civilians and the radical extremist actions of Israeli governments and military forces, just as American students are taught about the crimes of Nazi Germany. Because Polling has shown periods in which a majority of Americans opposed U.S. military aid to Israel, including majorities saying the United States should stop providing military assistance. Despite that public opposition, a corrupted and sell out traitor Congress continued authorizing and funding U.S. assistance to Israel. Children deserve to understand those contradictions and corruption instead of being spoon-fed a sanitized propagandist political narrative. If we’re going to teach history, then teach all of it — not the idiot making versions that protects radical extremist governments from accountability.

Students absolutely should learn about Israel, Palestine, radical extremist Judaism, radical extremist Islam, the Holocaust, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the modern Middle East. But teaching global history means teaching history — not manufacturing a preferred political narrative and presenting it to children as unquestionable truth.

That standard has to apply to everyone.

Whether the propaganda is patriotic mythology about America, religious ideology, anti-Muslim stereotypes, pro-Israel narratives, anti-Israel narratives, or any other political agenda, children deserve better than adults using the classroom to attempt to manufacture their preferred type of idiot voters.

The goal of education should be to make young people harder to manipulate, not easier and stupid.

That means teaching students how to examine primary sources, compare competing accounts, identify propaganda, understand historical context, recognize bias, and distinguish documented facts from political interpretation.

We should be teaching young people how to think, not programming them with what to think.

So, Millennials and Gen Z: maybe it’s time we stop accepting the textbooks we grew up with simply because they were the textbooks we grew up with.

I’m not saying every page of every McGraw Hill book is automatically false. I’m saying we should be willing to scrutinize the publishers whose books have shaped generations of American students — and demand something better when those materials leave out essential history or present it through a sanitized lens that only wastes people time.

We don’t need textbooks that tell our children what to think.

We need textbooks that give them enough of the truth to think for themselves.

We must oppose the idiotization of the youth — the process of giving young people simplified, sanitized, politically convenient versions of history instead of the tools they need to understand the complicated world they are inheriting.

Because the next generation deserves an education that doesn’t protect America or Israel mythology — from uncomfortable facts.

Our kids deserve the history. Not fairy tales.