I too would like it taught in schools, but I also think its important to have reliable sources for the bare facts. It depresses me when I go to the history section in a bookstore and see how much of it is given over to conflicting viewpoints of the same events, so there's (almost) different versions of history available depending on what you already like to believe - conservative history over here, liberal history over there, progressive history in this corner and so on.
> I too would like it taught in schools, but I also think its important to have reliable sources for the bare facts.
No such thing is possible. Facts are inferred unreliably from physical evidence and (at best) primary sources which are written by people who (claim to have) direct experience, but who also write with agendas.
> It depresses me when I go to the history section in a bookstore and see how much of it is given over to conflicting viewpoints of the same events, so there's (almost) different versions of history available depending on what you already like to believe
I don't know how you'd expect it to be otherwise; if you look at first-person accounts of current events, its clear that agendas and biases shape them, and history is largely what is pieced together from those kinds of accounts (often fragments of those kinds of accounts!) plus fragmentary physical evidence. Even if historians didn't have their own biases, there's multiple self-narratives that can be reconstructed to explain the evidence historians work from and no foolproof way to choose the right one from among those.
I think you're exaggerating the difficulty. We have more than sufficient documentation of many facts to make definitive statements about them, and where we are not sure abou ttheir provenance we can qualify our statements as being limited to a sinlge source or being controversial. We could, for example, dispute the historical causes of the Battle of Waterloo all day, but there's widespread agreement that it took place 200 years ago next Thursday, who the principles were, how it proceeded, and what the outcome was. Of course there are numerous details about the event that event that remain the subject of historical inquiry; did Wellington meet Blucher at 9pm or 10pm, and where on the battlefield did this meeting take place?
It's certainly true that any historical incident comes with a mass of unanswered questions, sometimes of great import - witness the ongoing controversies over the assassination of Kennedy or the authorship of the September 11 2001 attacks in modern times. But there is little dispute that that assassination and those attacks took place on those dates, what the basic nature of those events were and what major changes ensued in the aftermath. Although we face significant epistemological limitations in studying history, you seem to be arguing an almost solipsistic position, as if the impossibility of knowing everything invalidated the notion of knowing anything.
Matters of fact (even if wrong) can be linked together into a web of evidence and assumptions and would serve at least to illustrate what we know and don't know.
A laudable goal, but one I'm not sure can be achieved. It's often difficult or impossible to obtain accurate reporting of today's events, and, at least in my experience, the passage of time does nothing to simplify the task.
