History, memory, stories and sources

Knowledge question: To what extent is history reliable?

History in general is like a collection of memories, stories or facts told by people. Even though many historians try to find as many reliable primary sources, it's hard to find a lot of evidence that adds on or proves that something really happened in the past and that's why many historians tend to make guesses. Of course, passing your knowledge in form of storytelling to further generations seems reasonable, however has a lot of side effects. Because Humans are social animals, they tend to alter the stories and facts in order to make it more suitable for their own good and appeal to their in-group, which makes history less reliable. Humans always tend to conform and in an experiment carried out by Micah Edelson, Tali Sharot, Raymond Dolan and Yadin Dubai, that was shown to be true, 70% of the participants comforted and altered their answers accordingly to the ones given (which was a false feedback). Furthermore, this study suggested that feedback of others has the ability to strongly shape our remembered experience and the humans are all performers, twisting their stories for strangers. 

A new history textbook in Beijing now contains only few sentences that involve the French and Bolshevik Revolutions, Mao, the Long March, colonial oppression of China and the Rape of Nanjing. In the new history syllabus there's more focus on economic growth, innovation, foreign trade, political stability, respect for diverse cultures and social harmony, which doesn't seem right, because how can students learn about their countries real history when it's compressed to small sentences or isn't even mentioned in classes. However Zhou Xuequin, a historian at Shanghai University  defends this new textbook saying that “Our traditional version of history was focused on ideology and national identity, the new history is less ideological, and that suits the political goals of today.” It is also important to note that the government has a big role in approving textbooks, which means that to some extent the government is the reason why the real history of China was basically eliminated and that is a complete brainwash of students in China. By doing so the government is basically trying to hide all the events, where China acted violently to show that China is a great non violent country that never made any mistakes. But how are students supposed to learn from the mistakes made in the past by Chinese  when they don't even learn about it in school. Because of this, a lot of new generations will repeat those mistakes made in the past. Adding on, since humans are known as the storyteller machines, it will be impossible for current Chinese students to pass on their knowledge on further generations, which also would cause similar problems (since passing on our knowledge creates sense of mistakes).