I agree, history should be told accurately, but I think it needs to be done with some intellectual finesse. There's a reason we don't tell kindergarteners, "Now, children, Christopher Columbus was a greedy man who was willing to break the rules and did terrible things to a lot of people! Aren't you proud to be Americans?" Likewise, I think there's a place for understanding Thanksgiving in the a historically accurate context, but not at the expense of traumatizing children over political correctness.
Well, and at least in my experience, it's not like educators can be relied on to give a completely accurate telling of history either. I remember starting high school and the first day of class, my history teacher gave a twenty-minute schpeal on how the Declaration of Independence was a forged document and that Thomas Jefferson stole all of his ideas from Locke and that we were all based on a lie. I was pretty shocked as a 14-year-old and it made me question 8 years of teaching that said the Declaration of Independence was a great document that let to our freedom!
When I started college, I was able to read more of the works of Locke and study the Declaration of Independence in more details. Yes, it was heavily based on the works of John Locke, but they were concepts that would be familiar with many colonists. In many ways, it was more just a reiteration of popular political thinking. (DofI purports, of course "life, liberty, pursuit of happiness," Lock "life, liberty, and the pursuit of property." Jefferson changed it because the pursuit of land sounded too materialistic.) And let's be honest, in a lot of ways the DofI was political propaganda, too. But it's with years of study and research and a more sophisticated understanding of history to be able to reconcile these facts. It wouldn't be right to throw first graders into this debate and expect them to have the intellectual sophistication to work through it without growing despondent.
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