In honor of the release of Titanic 3D this Wednesday, kids all over the country paid homage to the real-life tragedy in a manner befitting of most American teenagers: by demonstrating their complete ignorance of the fact that it ever happened. To prove that people care less about historical accuracy and more about seeing Kate Winslet's turn-of-the-century muff in 3D, HuffPo Entertainment has assembled a series of tweets questioning whether or not the 1997 James Cameron classic was "based on a true story," and it is possibly the best argument for home-schooling that I've ever heard.
To be fair, not all of the tweets question whether or not the sinking of the Titanic — which occurred on April 15, 1912, exactly one hundred years from next Sunday — actually happened. Some of them have to do with the historical accuracy of the Jack/Rose relationship, which I guess is a legitimate question to ask if you are eight years old in 1998 and you've just seen the movie for the first time on VHS and your knowledge of romantic relationships is based entirely on Disney movie tropes and the conversations you act out with your Barbie and Ken before you make them scissor on your carpet.
We talk a lot about public education's failure to teach kids American history and Hollywood inaccurately representing historical events, but the way I see it, there's really only one solution to these two problems. And that is giving every child in America a U.S. history textbook with this photo on the cover: