Our typical approach to history is doing kids a great disservice

The other day I read one of those books that holds a surprise on every page. Michael A. Morse's academic study, How the Celts Came to Britain: Druids, Ancient Skulls and the Birth of Archaeology (Tempus, 2005), stands our current understanding of the Celts on its head. The Celts, it turns out, didn't come to Britain thousands of years ago—with moonlit Druidic rituals held amidst the megaliths of Stonehenge. They only appeared in the imaginations of a succession of monks, antiquarians, philologists, and the like. As far as modern science can tell, there was no ancient group that knew itself as Celts. The Celts were not discovered—they were invented.

Morse shows how, examined closely, various definitions of the Celts are contradictory. Some historians claim to trace them everywhere, from Rome to Scotland. Others compete to find them in their purest form, such as on the most isolated rocks of the North Sea. Worse yet, 19th-century ideas about the Celts were tied to racial theories that, to this day, have political consequences. So much so that members of the current generation of archaeologists, doing so much to shatter the old views of the Celts, feel constrained to preface their studies with confessions of their own biases—much like white Americans writing about blacks.

I don't mention this to encourage you to weed books about the Celts, nor to make sure you add the new view to your collections. Just the opposite. The very point of Morse's book is to trace how each stage of the invention of the Celts reflected the views of its time.

In the 15th century, for example, Annius of Viterbo traced the lineage of the early Britons to the sons of Noah, which also meant that advocates for languages such as Welsh argued that they were the first tongues spoken after the fall of Babel. Our knowledge of the world is just that, our knowledge—the world filtered through our ability to evaluate and perceive it. That is not to say that knowledge is merely subjective. In fact, the one thing we can certainly learn from Morse's study is that we are often wrong.

But when we talk to young readers, we often take the opposite view. We present history as a series of settled, unchanging facts, and we quickly gloss over any uncertainties. Instead of helping kids see that knowledge is an ongoing process, we act as if we already know everything. The one exception? Books about dinosaurs. Even there, while many books discuss changing theories, there's often a tone of regret—don't worry, this is unsettled, but we'll soon get it right. One wonderful exception is Boy, Were We Wrong About Dinosaurs! (Dutton, 2005) by Kathleen V. Kudlinski.

As I read Kudlinski's fine picture book to Sasha, my about-to-be-six-year-old son, he reacted the same way I did to Morse's book. Kudlinski's text kept pointing out how theories are built from clues and evidence, which prompted Sasha to question the evidence. When the author discussed dinosaur tracks, Sasha recalled reading something about the tools paleontologists use and wondered how they could lift a track. In fact, on nearly every page Sasha recalled something he had read elsewhere and compared that to what he was now reading. He realized, as he put it, that “we might still be wrong, after all, even now. This is just a theory.”

Perfect. Sasha's response was not an admission of defeat. It was the moment when the world opened up, ready for him to examine, test, and piece together in new ways. Now all children's book publishers need to do is to publish 1,000 other books filled with admissions of our errors, with space for new ideas. Or we could visit Stonehenge and wait for the Druids to return.