Education in America is bad and deficient. I hear that all the time. Unless you live in the woods or are a dead person come back to haunt my blog posts, you have also heard it time and again. Politically, both the left and the right make this claim, but obviously for different reasons.

On the right, the complaints are usually that no one teaches about the founding fathers or the greatness of America anymore, that teachers are too leftist and liberal and teach social justice, and of course, COMMON CORE!!!!!!!!

On the left, the complaint is that schools just aren’t progressive enough. Science isn’t sciencey enough, nobody talks about how evil America is, people still want to acknowledge that Civil War units had flags, and NOT ENOUGH COMMON CORE!!!!!!!

But one of the chief complaints from the left is that Americans teach a pollyana view of America that doesn’t account for her many awful and terrible atrocities against mankind and God and fine dining.

QUICK FACT: There is thing in smart talk called “confirmation bias,” and here is how it works: people develop a habit of interpreting things in a way that supports a conclusion that they’ve already drawn. A good example is the above two paragraphs about education.

Enter Facebook.

A post has gone viral on Facebook in the last few days that is a great example of these different views on education. Rather than describe the post to you, I will simply give you a screenshot of it. A picture is worth a thousand keyboard strokes.

As you can see, hundreds of thousands of people have shared this post. Here is what it looks like when it is shared, with the names and original message blurred so you can project your biases on to it. (I’m very accommodating.)

As you can see, the original message gets shared with the photo. I’ve seen this shared hundreds of times personally. Each time, taken uncritically as a truthful representation of the nations of Native American tribes prior to American colonization.

“I’ve never seen this map in my entire 25 years of formal education,” says the original post, a sentiment echoed thousands upon thousands of times. The implication being that the information was repressed because evil American teachers don’t want you to know the truth. But that implication is silly. Do you know why this map isn’t used in history class?

It isn’t history.

That’s right. This is a fictional map. It is made up. It is speculative. It is imaginary. This map is a look at theoretical North America TODAY if the Europeans had never come here and colonized.

The fact that it has the date literally printed right on it seems to have escaped the notice of some three hundred thousand people.

This map was posted just eight days ago at the appropriately named Alternate History Weekly, which in turn got it from a Reddit post here. The most fun part of the Reddit link is that at the top of the page it suggests you “also check out /r/ImaginaryMaps.”

You want to complain about education? Here is my complaint: we don’t teach attention to detail or critical thinking. People accept as true something that confirms the beliefs they already bitterly cling to. So this work of fiction becomes an indictment of the racist nature of education in America because some people never saw it and, once they did, just accepted as true a premise that comes from … well who knows? As I said, the date is literally directly on it.

Three hundred. Thousand. People.

But wait, you may be thinking. Perhaps that is speculative, but is it really that bad? It can’t be that far off from the way it really was, right? The fact is we haven’t seen any full map of the tribes prior to colonization and have raised awareness so frankly, we don’t feel bad.

Prepare to feel bad.

Here is a new and actual map of the uncolonized North American continent and the tribes of Native Americans prior to European colonization. (Click for the full map)