From Body and Soul, an interesting essay on the teaching of history from which the following is excerpted:
I’ve been pleasantly surprised — up to a point — with the way history is covered in my daughter’s class. When my son was her age, ten years ago, he had a teacher who was so uninterested in history — she actually told me that she despised the subject — that one time a kid recited, “The Indians made corn and ate baskets,” and the teacher just nodded and moved on. As long as the kid got Indians, corn, and baskets in one sentence, as far as she was concerned he knew everything he needed to know about Native Americans. And it wasn’t likely she was ever going to ask a kid to put Columbus and genocide in the same sentence.
Ever since then, “The Indians made corn and ate baskets” has been our code for how bad elementary school history is.