The men and women of Alabama - from the Greatest Generation to Baby Boomers like me - learned Alabama history from the famous old textbook "Know Alabama."

It should be called "No Wonder, Alabama." It explains a lot.

Fourth graders until the '70s learned how living on a plantation was "one of the happiest ways of life." Just imagine yourself, the 1957 edition says, on your family plantation:

"How's it coming Sam," your father asks one of the old Negroes.

"'Fine, Marse Tom, 'jes fine. We got 'most more cotton than we can pick.' Then Sam chuckles to himself and goes back to picking as fast as he can.

"One of the little Negro boys is called 'Jig' He got that name because he dances so well when the Negroes play their banjos.

"Jig comes up and says 'Let me play.'"

"And you say "All right, but you be the captive Indian."

"That will be fun," Jig says, and he goes off gladly to be the Indian, to hide and then get himself captured."

Wait a minute. Whaaat? That was a real textbook.

One version of the book does at least acknowledge that life is not always perfect on a plantation. For the master, anyway:

"No plantation had a model group of slaves, for planters had to buy whatever slaves they could get. Some slaves were good workers and very obedient. Many took pride in what they did, and loved their cabins and the plantation as much as if they actually owned them. Others were lazy, disobedient, and sometimes vicious."

And then there was that unfortunate War Between the States.

"The Southerners had a right under the law to own slaves, and the Southern states had a right under the law to leave the United States. Many Southerners did not want to leave the Union. But when Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860, the South felt that they had to leave the Union to keep their rights."

And this is what Alabama taught its children about the Ku Klux Klan:

"The loyal white men of Alabama saw they could not depend on the laws or the state government to protect their families. They knew they had to do something to bring back law and order, to get the government back in the hands of honest men who knew how to run it.

"They (the Klan) held their courts in the dark forests at night; they passed sentence on the criminals and they carried out the sentence. Sometimes the sentence would be to leave the state.

"After a while the Klan struck fear in the hearts of the "carpetbaggers" and other lawless men who had taken control of the state.... The Negroes who had been fooled by the false promises of the "carpetbaggers" decided to get themselves jobs and settle down to make an honest living.

"Many of the Negroes in the South remained loyal to the white Southerners. Even though they had lately been freed from slavery, even though they had no education, they knew who their friends were."

This is what Alabama taught, until after Martin Luther King Jr. (he got one mention in the 1970 book) was killed. This is what was taught to Legislators who now want to dabble in education, to encourage teachers to ignore accepted science and teach whatever they happen to believe about evolution, or climate change, or presumably alien abduction.

Education is not a priority in Alabama, and it never has been. The No. 1 priority is and always has been indoctrination.

It's not easy to examine who we really are. It is not easy to see who we really were. Historian Hardy Jackson recalls a student who came through his class at Jacksonville State after growing up learning only these, um, traditional views of history.

The student was shaken. When he finished Jackson's more honest look at history, he had the words for his professor.

"I feel like going out and shooting Ol' Yeller," he said.

The past - like any hard truth - is painful. But if we teach only what we want to believe, about history or science or anything else, the future will be worse.