I can definitely trust the information that I read in my
textbooks, right? Aren’t they just
filled with facts about what happened in the past? But where and who is all
that information coming from?!? I don’t
know what to believe anymore!
That is definitely how The
Daughter of Time is making me feel. On
Grant’s quest to discover the truth about Richard III, he realizes that
different sources of history tell different accounts about the life of
Richard. There is no way he could know
what ACTUALLY happened unless he lived during that time. Yet, we are taught in schools with the aid of
textbook and we are just supposed to trust what is written. At the same time, our parents or teachers
probably taught us: “don’t believe everything you see/read.”
This is just like articles found on the internet. While I’m scrolling through Facebook and
reading a few of the articles that my friends’ shared, I usually make a
conscious effort not to believe everything that I read. I have fallen for those fake or misleading
articles too many times. But because we
are taught not to believe everything we read, why do we still do it outside of
the internet? We shouldn’t automatically
believe the words in our textbooks just because they are “scholarly” or educational
tools. The authors of history books were
probably not present during the times they wrote about, so how can they be sure
about anything? They must have gotten
their information elsewhere and there is no way of knowing what is true and
what is false.
On another note about this topic, we must be aware of author
biases. I was taught that every author
has a bias and sometimes their biases show (even when trying to be as unbiased
as possible.) If this is the case, the
authors of textbooks are biased too.
This means that readers might only get the information that the author
believed or wanted to share, not the full story. Maybe this was the case with the books
written about Richard III. It seems that
people had very strong opinions about him, so that is why textbooks portray him
as a villain.
I think that The
Daughter of Time is reinforcing a lesson that we all know very well. We can’t be too quick to trust what we
read. Our textbooks cannot be completely
accurate because the authors have not experienced all of history or know
everything that happened. Even biases
can get in the way of the truth.
