I don't usually pay much attention to Sen. John Kuhn, the Charleston Republican who has a quick, dumb solution to every complex problem. But Kuhn introduced legislation recently to require a year of South Carolina history be taught to all eighth-graders in the state school system and that can't be all bad.

Let's avoid making the same mistake our ancestors made in teaching South Carolina history. For most of the 20th century, state history was taught from the textbooks of Mary C. Simms Oliphant. Born in 1891, her mind was rooted in notions of Southern romanticism and white supremacy, and she indoctrinated generations of us with her 19th-century ideas. Her third-grade and seventh-grade textbooks were used in the state's public schools -- by black students and white -- from 1917 to 1984.

Oliphant described slavery as a benign institution in her 1958 edition of The History of South Carolina: "Most masters treated their slaves kindly," she wrote. Elsewhere: "Most slaves were treated well, if only because it was to the planter's interest to have them healthy and contented."

Slavery wasn't so bad, according to Oliphant: "The Africans were used to a hot climate. They made fine workers under the Carolina sun." And besides, there were lots of benefits which Northern abolitionists failed to appreciate: Slave owners "said that Africans were brought from a worse life to a better one. As slaves, they were trained in the ways of civilization. Above all, the landowners argued, the slaves were given the opportunity to become Christians in a Christian land, instead of remaining heathen in a savage country."

In Oliphant's history, blacks were virtually invisible. Only one African-American was identified by name in her 432-page 1958 text that covered state history from pre-Colonial times to post-World War II. Of the hundreds of illustrations, blacks were depicted in only nine. There were no illustrations of slaves in chains or on auction blocks, no hint of the horrific Middle Passage from Africa. Blacks were faceless, nameless creatures, put here by the hand of God to serve white people.

Oliphant devoted no less than 16 pages to the founding of the Confederate government, the battles of the Civil War, the inevitable defeat. Yet she dared not confront the great truth behind the tragedy -- that 60 percent of South Carolina's population in 1860 was black, the vast majority owned by white people. This demographic and economic reality dictated every important aspect of South Carolina's culture and politics, then and for generations to come.

The Civil War inspired Oliphant's most passionate prose, as when she described the depredations of those wicked Yankees: "Sherman's soldiers burned houses, ran off livestock, destroyed crops, and took everything that could be carried away. Many fine houses were destroyed by Sherman's men.‘.‘.‘. One family was burned to death in their home."

This is Oliphant's paean to her hero, General Wade Hampton III: "On the State House grounds, he rides in bronze, a towering figure on his mettlesome steed, the symbol of all that is best in South Carolina and the South."

Yet, in her 16 pages of fire and fury, Oliphant could not bring herself to mention the single bloodiest battle of the Civil War fought on South Carolina soil --the assault on Battery Wagener by the black troops of the Massachusetts 54th.

Oliphant took a very unreconstructed view of Reconstruction. The defenders of white supremacy -- the Red Shirts and, to a lesser degree, the Ku Klux Klan -- were heroic in her telling. "The sight of the mounted klansmen in their white robes was enough to terrorize the Negroes. When the courts did not punish Negroes who were supposed to have committed crimes, the Klan punished them."

A few years ago the nation was amazed and amused at our fracas over the Confederate flag. How, the world wondered, could anyone seriously claim that the flag had nothing to do with racism or that the Civil War was not fought over slavery? What the world failed to understand was that we were not showing our ignorance. We were showing our education.

Sen. Kuhn's bill mandates that two periods of state history get special attention: Reconstruction and the civil rights movement. If his bill can address a century of malignant history education, then let's give it a chance. We have a lot of damage to undo.