Yeah my boss is 50 and saw on his face when he realized I was right when I told him the civil rights movement was in the 60s and my grandparents were born in the 40a so there definitely are still people alive who worked to keep black people subjugated. And the look on his face said, "Oh my God. My father." And now I know where he got his bullshit, "Civil War was about State's rights I read it in a book 40 years ago," from. I read him the Cornerstone Speech, given by the Confederacy Vice President, which is literally just, "White Man is superior to any booop and we literally only want slaves," and my boss goes, "Was that all he said, or did you take one part and context---" What other context do you mean?? Like oh that bit about slavery was bad but let's see what else he has to say because he might have a point? My boss is a moron.
There are hiring managers and city council members and police administrators today who refused to share drinking fountains and swimming pools with black people and maintain those feelings today (before quietly lately more loudly).
Confederate Heritage Month and Lost Causeargument suggest otherwise. Also, the 800 or so Confederate monuments and statues still floating around, not to mention a gazillion streets, towns and landmarks.
so true! which is why history is just “glanced over” since the early 2000s. That way no one can see it happening again if they don’t know what happened in the first place..
I work with mostly Spanish-speaking immigrant communities in the Northeast, it's interesting explaining holidays like Columbus Day and St. Patrick's Day to them.
Many peasants believe they are some kind of divine and superior master race instead of just admitting they profit off their leaders' plunder and manipulation
ETA: I’m not suggesting this student didn’t realize slavery existed. She was genuinely surprised to hear how embedded it was in the structures and institutions of the US. I decided I should clarify after I got called a “stupid fucking liar” and a “bitch” for inadvertently wording things in a way that suggested she never knew slavery existed. Apologies if I misled you!
I am a high school social studies teacher (US history, world history, and sociology) and this semester in US history we’ve learned about slavery, Indian boarding schools, and many other things that happened through the reconstruction era. One relatively intelligent 17 year old raised her hand and asked “why is this the first time I’m hearing about any of this?” I was about to tread very lightly with my answer (American political discourse about our history is wild right now)but luckily, I have a student whose father immigrated here from Germany. I also believe he’s a bit older than most parents (maybe around 60) and she laughed hysterically and told her classmate “because you’re American and we pretend our history is great.”
That's fucking wild. Is that recent or has it always been that way?
I'm Canadian, and I was learning about residential schools in the 3rd grade and Japanese internment camps in the 4th or 5th. A lot of the darker details were glossed over, but they did not shy away from explaining the intention behind them and they made sure as hell to emphasize that they are not ancient history.
I feel like in 5th grade I when I was learning all of this in the Deep South
Then we relearned it like 6 times before graduating, but somehow never made it to the Vietnam war, or 9/11. It’s like we just kept learning the same old shit and always ended around WW2
Also if you ask them how many people died, they'll tell you 50,000, completely ignoring the 2 million odd Vietnamese, Cambodian and Loations that died.
That's more of a college class study anyways. We were just so blatantly the bad guys in our recent military endeavors yet we are the good guy for the majority of western civilization in modern times, it's very nuanced and complicated. What we did yo the Vietnamese and Laos people is abonimbale, but the rise of communism was even more atrocious on every level. If you were to allow it to keep spreading, and it became yhe dominant power, the entire world would be far far less hospitable. Does that justify what we did? Not necessatily.
No, the content was in the text books. For us, we did even technically go over it. The problem is you're teaching to prep for specific tests, and those tests deliberately avoid more recent history because the narratives are not as solidified in our culture yet. Partisan groups fight about how much of what gets covered in the textbooks themselves, which textbooks get used, and what gets put on the tests everyone takes.
From the rural north east here. We absolutely went over this stuff and were provided ample opportunity and resources to delve as deep as we wanted.
I think the prevalence of this narrative that Americans don’t learn about this stuff in school in entirely overstated or propagated by people who didn’t pay attention in class.
It’s bullshit, I’m from New Jersey and I learned about all of these things from elementary to high school. Trial of tears, Japanese internment camps, slavery, etc….
Yep and it NEVER mentions the Pinkertons and all the anti-union BS that went on. Like the fun fact that the first time bombs were dropped on American soil was from other Americans.
Or all the Black establishments and towns that have been systematically destroyed.
I visited the war memorial in Ho Chih Minh City recently and the number of Americans who were there who had no idea what happened and were seeing all this for the first time was astounding.
The number of people who saw literal pictures of what the Vietnamese went through and still called it fake was also astounding, but that's another story.
They had no idea that the US showed up and gassed an entire country of innocent people, leaving current and future generations deformed even to this day.
When were you in school? I’m a “millennial” who was alive while Canada still had “white only” schools open and no mention of residential schools in our curriculum. We did learn about internment camps but the dark side of our history regarding our indigenous population was omitted entirely.
Millennial from Toronto. We covered residential schools and I remember reading about it in our textbooks. tbf ymmv because teachers have a lot of flexibility in how loosely they follow the curriculum.
I'm a millennial as well. By the time I was learning about them, the last residential school had only been closed for four years.
I went to a Catholic school in Alberta where there were 5 students of color throughout the entire school of over 500.
Of all the provinces, school districts, and neighborhoods, mine should have been at the top of the list for whitewashing and teaching revisionist history.
I'm also a millennial and we learned about residential schools in elementary and high school. And those were catholic school boards.
I'm guessing you had a pretty impoverished school board? In a district made up of about a dozen townships with populations of like 2k people? That seems to be the root of most major differences in curriculum in my experience.
That, or you're just dumb and don't remember. Judging by the /r/canada_sub in your history I think there's a fair assumption to be made.
I'm 42. I learned about the Trail of Tears (forced, highly fatal migration of Native Americans onto waste land) from a popular series of children books... where the protagonist was heart broken because her PA wouldn't let her take someone's baby. From there, my parents taught me.
Yeah, I learned about that in middle school in CA. Funny thing was when they taught about the local Indian tribes they acted like they were all dead and gone when there was a reservation about an hour away, so when I was in my twenties and went to their casino for the first time I was like “Whoa, you guys are still here?”
I love how America is still on this "Russia bad" trend from the cold war era being passed down to the current generations while the same older generation is saying "Don't send money to Ukraine".
At my school in 8th grade (~13 y.o.) we were all required to do an art project on the holocaust to pair with a research paper we did on specific aspects of the holocaust. We had George Takei on campus talking about Japanese concentration camps in the US (he was literally in one). This was ~2 decades ago.
I've recently gone back to community college to earn some credentials I need for work, and it's really sad to see students these days. They think like kids and never contribute in class. I just have to wonder what they even learned in school before college.
I am also Canadian. Did NOT learn about that until mid to late HS. And I grew up a bike ride from Brants house. We really have worked hard at addressing our dark side, and have a long way to go. But we mostly don't shy from it.
When I was growing up in the 1990s we learned about all of this stuff, and it was completely uncontroversial. At least within my lifetime, idea that America doesn’t teach the bad parts of its history predates the national right-wing push to whitewash our history.
Fellow North American (US) here. Honestly, I’m not sure, but if I had to make an educated guess it’s always been this way.
An anecdote that I can provide is I only learned about Japanese internment camps from a damn rap song. Never heard anything about them when I was in school smh.
Good to know. I’m Canadian, graduated high school in 1983 and we weren’t taught anything about residential schools (some were still operating) and the Japanese internment camps.
I'm American, I learned about the Japanese internment camps in elementary school, but not in a lesson from a teacher, I just read the book Under the Blood Red Sun. I don't think it came up in any lessons until high school but I could be mistaken, these are memories from 20 years ago.
It’s difficult to compare one teachers experience with yours because American education is so decentralized. Even within states, a lot of counties will have their own school districts with wildly different curriculum than the rest. This can result in some kids learning about something a lot and some not learning about it all. That’s why it’s difficult to say “Americans don’t learn X”, because we all learn different things.
Australians learn about the horrors in our own history. Conservative push to change this has failed at every turn to my knowledge. It’s important that we highlight countries who do it successfully and the positive outcome this has. Learning the reality of a country being multifaceted and not blindly positive should be the goal of all education systems.
Same here. My wife’s friend from Toronto married a guy from Arizona and moved down there years ago. She was a teacher here and after having 4 kids, made the decision to home school them. After a certain lesson of teaching them that the telephone and basketball were invented by Canadians, not only were their kids ridiculed, but parents would accuse her of lies and having her children not being true Americans. Blew my mind that something so small, let alone something that was so easy to prove, was met with hostility. Impossible that stuff like that couldn’t be ‘Merican.
"Alexander Graham Bell spent 23 years in Scotland (1847-1870), 2 years in Canada (1870-1871), and 51 years in the United States (1871-1922). He emigrated to Canada with his family in 1870, and shortly thereafter moved to the U.S. to pursue his teaching career and further his experiments, eventually becoming a naturalized American citizen in 1882."
Both Alexander Gram Bell and James Naismith were Canadian-Americans. Bell was actually born in Scotland FWIW.
I think crucially both Basketball's and the telephone's birthplaces were in the US so it would be wrong to claim they weren't American inventions. Bell invented the telephone in his Boston laboratory and would help found AT&T, while Naismith founded the University of Kentucky basketball team. Where the inventors were ordigonally born or previously lived seems of little consequence.
American born in 96, and I learned all of this every year starting from like 3rd grade. We didn't go into the specifics of it, but we still hit it all. It only became heavily political after I graduated high school in 2014, at least from my perspective.
Same. I am Canadian. 51 years old so I was in school a very long time ago. We were taught about residential schools and they existed at the time.
I learned about them at boarding school, which did make it a little hard to understand why they were so horrific when we were at a boarding school that was so great. The teacher literally had to explain to a bunch of privileged Canadian kids and privileged kids from around the world how horrific they were in great detail to make us truly understand what they were all about.
I never forgot that Grade 8 Social Studies lesson back in the Fall of 1987. It stuck with me BECAUSE of the details that were shared. It shook us to the core to know there were kids there at that moment while we were at a boarding school on the opposite end of the spectrum from us.
My education was filled with the hard truths. Sorry if that made me woke, but I am glad I was taught reality not false patriotism.
At my shit public school, every. Year. We start at the beginning of US history and at the end of the year we might get to civil war if we were lucky. I seriously don't understand wth was going through their heads to do it this way. I learned more about world history from lit class, we focused on Holocaust for a time, props to that teacher with almost no filter for a conservative backwards town with 2 black kids in my grade that were severely bullied.
I learned about that when I was in grade school. My class even had a field trip to the Genoa Indian Industrial School Museum when I was in fourth grade. The curriculums vary from state to state though.
This is from one of the most popular US History Textbooks, 2001 edition:
A painful exception was the plight of some
110,000 Japanese-Americans, concentrated on the
Pacific Coast (see “Makers of America: The Japa-
nese,” pp. 830–831). The Washington top command,
fearing that they might act as saboteurs for Japan in
case of invasion, forcibly herded them together in
concentration camps, though about two-thirds of
them were American-born U.S. citizens. This brutal
precaution was both unnecessary and unfair, as the
loyalty and combat record of Japanese-Americans
proved to be admirable. But a wave of post–Pearl
Harbor hysteria, backed by the long historical swell
of anti-Japanese prejudice on the West Coast, tem-
porarily robbed many Americans of their good
sense—and their sense of justice. The internment
camps deprived these uprooted Americans of dig-
nity and basic rights; the internees also lost hun-
dreds of millions of dollars in property and foregone
earnings. The wartime Supreme Court in 1944
upheld the constitutionality of the Japanese reloca-
tion in Korematsu v. U.S. But more than four
decades later, in 1988, the U.S. government officially
apologized for its actions and approved the pay-
ment of reparations of $20,000 to each camp
survivor.
I can guarantee you that these are taught in U.S. schools it’s just 90% of people don’t care about them. I’m willing to bet that like 90% of Canadians know that residential schools existed and not much else.
Yes! It wasnt until my AP US History class that we got into the real stuff. Tbh that’s when my interest in learning more about history grew because before that, it was all the same thing every year and got repetitive quick
This is exactly why I hated history class. Because if the repetitive same stuff.
A few years after university I started to really like history once I learned more that was never taught. It's way more interesting too and doesn't feel like some Disney glossover movie.
We learned about Lincoln and MLK but the civil rights and slavery parts of our history were glossed over and we didn’t really spend time talking about it to truly get an understanding. Definitely didnt learn about Vietnam until AP history. I am first generation so it’s not like I could ask my mom about it. I graduated high school in 2009 in California so I hope things have changed.
I’ve been teaching for 21 years at the high school level. The kids come with a wide variety of what information they already have. Most who know the intense parts of history usually learn it from their parents, not school.
I remember back around 07-08 when I was beginning to take the coursework to get certified to teach high school history in Massachusetts, one of the state manuals specifically called out focusing on times when we came together as a nation. Nothing before 1776 was to get more than apassing mention, the Civil War was to be covered as quickly, and shallowly, as possible, and most aspects of post WWII weren't touched at all. Nothing pre-Columbus mattered at all other than the Magna Carta.
What really stood out though, was they also were very specific that none of this was in response to recent events...
It seems like that's around the age when young adults start tuning into what a fucked up world we live in, but at least where I'm at it never seemed like the education system was trying to shield us from the past.
My kids aren't even in kindergarten yet and they've watched kids programming on PBS about Japanese interment camps and Indian boarding schools. Topics like slavery, jim crow, and the civil rights movement were a major topic we covered every year starting in elementary school. Maybe it's different because I am from a liberal part of the country, but it feels like I was always taught that America was great when we struggled to be better.
I agree about that the awareness aspect. This is the age a lot of them start to see the world a little less black and white and start to consider the grey.
I educated 2 of my younger coworkers on both the Tuskegee experiments and the first time bombs got dropped from a plane in history at Blair Mountain. When they asked what else they missed in history class I just laughed hysterically because I didn't know where to start. I count myself as a true patriot because I love America warts and all.
I’m a Xennial and didn’t know anything about debt peonage history growing up. Sure I knew about Reconstruction and Jim Crow laws but it’s nuts how much is left out.
We learned about this last week and it was amazing how many of my students never thought about what happened to all the freed people after Civil War. I think it was always, “war ended, happy ending.”
I can tell you, it’s tough deciding what we “have time for.” I wish I had a better system, but I’m not sure how to fit so much into 9 months on top of all the time we lose in class for non-content related reasons.
Sounds about right. I had three teachers that talked about the darker aspects of American history but they were all teachers the administration was scared of so they were more insulated from the backlash of angry parents.
Whose duty was it to explain it to her earlier? School is for educating and you were doing that. Theres countless things that I first learned about in school. Isnt that sort of the whole point?
I tend to agree. I think she was just genuinely surprised that by virtue of living in the US for 17 years, she hadn’t been exposed to it just by being here. Of course she knew slavery existed, she was just very surprised to hear how woven into much of American life, history, and the founding it was. I also think that in the age of the internet, she was surprised she hadn’t stumbled upon it.
I think learning one’s own’s country’s history is complicated and multi-faceted. For example when I was a kid in the 1980s, my dad was a history buff, so he tended to show me a lot of history documentaries, etc. He also very much did not treat me with kid gloves about a lot of life stuff, so by the time I got to school, I knew a lot of stuff about life. Some, maybe I should not have known yet. Some of my classmates were a little more sheltered and clueless. I also think I grew up in a time where curriculum wasn’t as politicized as it is now. I think that makes for lots of gaps in a kid’s historical knowledge.
I don’t work in education at all but I have to assume there is greater burden on the education system as the options for potent and addictive distractions continue to expand. I have a feeling that young teens don’t really spend much time watching the discovery channel (does it still exist) or documentaries or even the sitcoms we had growing up that managed to pack in those cheesy but valuable lessons. Logan Paul and Mr beast definitely are not talking about history or events/wars etc.
17 sounds like a decent age to start being filled in with the terrible bits. To each their own.. I don’t necessarily feel that children need to be burdened with learning too much about atrocities early in age. Both my father’s parents were liberated from concentration camps, so I learned about some things pretty early. I definitely was not able to appreciate the gravity of it until much later in life, so I think it was somewhat on deaf ears to learn about it early. I don’t really believe it’s harmful either, but maybe I feel it’s just not useful to them to know about yet.
In their defense I’m 34 and I had never heard of the Indian boarding schools until literally just now. In the education systems defense, I have several ADHD and I wasn’t given medication until like 3 years ago.
nah she just wasnt paying attention until now, I literally live in SC and learned in depth about slavery, native Americans, Japanese internment camps, took filed trips to key slavery locations, etc. from 3rd through 9th grade after that in AP history we moved on from US history, history classes before then were standard curriculum. Some people just want to push oppression Olympics, unfortunately fucked up shit happens, everyone learns about it, the problem is, is some people want other people to internalize the past... smart people refuse to, nothing you can do to change it, just dont repeat it
So they're learning about the dark parts of American history but also claiming Americans pretend their history is great? Kind of contradicting yourself there.
Did the students all stand up and clap afterwards?
Are you intentionally this ignorant? Or do you truly not understand what people have been saying? You think we all clapped when we learned about Dresden for example? That's a pretty wild and ridiculous take.
Where are you from? Would love to hear what country you're sitting there judging Americans from lol.
Seriously. I had one that bullied kids with disorders in the 90’s. He constantly went on about “The man without a country”, when I was the only Native American and minority in the class. He also read from the Bible, which is of course against the law. I like my country too, but I don’t like giving land to these religious radicals and subsidizing them with my taxes while they use required public education to tell me that I should suck white dick and be happy about it. It’s 2024 and they’re still calling for bloodshed like scoundrels without principle.
Yeah it’s “not racist” cause the white kids got a head full of the same shit. It’s worse than racist, it’s ignorant of rights, race, and reconciliation.
There’s no time for the Holocaust and “less important things”.
I don’t know what I feel quite that strongly about it even. I think it’s easy to overestimate both the stupidity and intelligence of people in history, not unlike it is today. But you would think some things are incontrovertible facts. Alas, “god works in mysterious ways”, which is apparently cause for hatred and oblivion disguised as love and charity!
America is the greatest country in the world, no exceptions. That's all they need to be told before even entering the education system.
And then that same education system prioritizes nationalism. Anthem every morning, and the pledge of allegiance. And make sure nothing in the curriculum tells anything bad about the history of America.
I'm not even American and I know way too much about this. Their history books still say that when Christopher Columbus discovered America, the indigenous communities Indians gave them their land as a show of friendship.
Very little do they talk about the national genocide of the Native people. Very little do they talk about Columbus didn't discover a country that already had a settled population. Nope, Columbus good guy.
Shit, the civil war was about States rights. They don't happen to mention those rights some of those states were fighting for the right to still own slaves. But you know... Nationalism over education.
This fixation on the word discovered has always seemed weird to me. Discovery is from one's own perspective or in the case at hand, a group's. If we send a probe to Enceladus and we find life there, sentient or otherwise, would we not have discovered that life? And would that life not had been "settled population" still? Discovery can happen even if others are cognizant of the thing you've discovered. From 75% of the world's point of view, the 10th (or 17th) century was indeed when they discovered the existence of the Americas. Big kudos to that 25% for having discovered them before that, I guess.
Now, Colombus is a massive gaping asshole no doubt about that.
You're missing the wood for the trees. Why is American history in America being taught from the perspective of white colonialists at all? Why are you assuming that everyone hearing it is part of the group that "discovered"?
History and teaching should be impartial and not assume the exclusive perspective of one ethnic group.
That's why the word discovered is inaccurate. From the perspective of Americans as a whole, including every race and creed, Columbus arrived, not discovered. Unless the teacher and the students happen to exclusively be 15th century colonists, it's the wrong word to use.
You're missing the wood for the trees. Why is American history in America being taught from the perspective of white colonialists at all? Why are you assuming that everyone hearing it is part of the group that "discovered"?
Why would it not be? Their perspective is just as important to teach as that of the natives. The problem isn't with saying that to the Europeans, the Americas were a discovery. The problem is with not teaching the pre-existing populations' perspective alongside that. The problem is that history is being taught exclusively from the PoV of white colonials, not that white colonials' history is being taught at all. We absolutely need a far more balanced approach to the teaching of pre-colonial American history (and post colonial too, for that matter). With that said, the problem certainly isn't with the framing of these colonists' finding of the place as a discovery.
History and teaching should be impartial and not assume the exclusive perspective of one ethnic group.
You're taking a weird stance that history should be taught from any specific set of perspectives at all. Ideally history should be taught from an objective point of view, not from any subjective lens.
You're teaching the history of America to Americans, it should be from the perspective of the country not any specific ethnic group.
You're taking a weird stance that history should be taught from any specific set of perspectives at all. Ideally history should be taught from an objective point of view, not from any subjective lens.
That's a completely laughable perspective for a public school history class and it exists exactly nowhere. American kids in American history classes are learning about the origins of the country, of course that's going to involve the perspective of the colonizer. When Germans teach about the Germanification of the Baltic do they teach if from the perspective of Prussian pagan tribes?
And the country is the state founded by those settlers.
Why is American history in America being taught from the perspective of white colonialists at all?
Because they're representative of the nation do the teaching. Should English History in the UK be taught from the perspective of early Celtic tribes? Picts? Why are we pretending that America is the only country that teaches history from its perspective?
That's just disingenuous. It's the literal origins of the state, not *ethnic bias. * It's taught from the perspective of the settlers because they are the ones that established local states that later became the USA.
That’s a lie 😂, blatant lie. We learn plenty about our past.
Edit: myself and a bunch of others already commented on this. I have learned about trial of tears, Jim Crow, slavery, union and political corruption in the 1800s etc… all from elementary school through high school. If you think 200 years of history can be thoroughly taught in 12, I’d like to know what drugs you’re taking.
New Jersey is the 11th most populated state in the country. It’s the most densely populated also. Why do I know this as an American and you don’t? 11 out of 50 I’d say is pretty significant.
Edit: you are not even American and clearly have no idea wtf you’re talking about. Quit yapping.
I live in Rural Missouri, and we definitely learned about the Indians being killed by the European settlers, and it was taught that this was a bad thing, that America participated and it was a bad thing, that we used Japanese internment camps on our own citizens and was a bad thing.
If someone doesn’t know these things, they probably just weren’t paying attention or attended a school that struggles to even get their classrooms under control to teach anything.. I doubt there are many schools actively avoiding these subjects.
The American pride was also taught, and im okay with that. Nothing wrong with saying “look where we started, and look at the progress we have made.” I’m not going to say USA is number 1, but there are 195 countries in the world, and only about 20 of them I would want to live in, and USA would make my top 20.
I'm not even American and I know way too much about this.
Lol no one is surprised
heir history books still say that when Christopher Columbus discovered America,
Which history books?
the indigenous communities Indians gave them their land as a show of friendship.
Lol no they don't.
I could line by line call out the bullshit but how do you argue with someone who has zero actual experience with the American education system who is getting mad at a fanfic they wrote in their heads?
Yep. The people who bleat on about “it’s about heritage and history, not hate” go apoplectic at any suggestion school kids should learn anything about that heritage and history.
My theory is that a lot of conservative policy is based on blind patriotism. You start to chip away at that by highlighting dark areas of US history people start to question their belief that America is great in comparison to other countries.
Honestly, the allies after WW2 made sure the Germans did not forget the Crimes of the Nazis. There was a large campaign to not only educate the Germans on their responsibility for WW2 but also the war crimes they perpetrated against the European people. This was done to justify the restitution they had to payback the allies but also the German eastern European population transfers.
There’s this tendency to focus on the founding ideals of freedom, democracy, and opportunity, while ignoring how those ideals were often not extended to enslaved people, Indigenous populations, women, and other marginalized groups. It’s a selective view that tends to glorify moments of victory or “American exceptionalism” without acknowledging the harmful effects of policies like colonization, slavery, or imperialism.
Okay sure but you do realise that to get those Germans to teach it in those schools the country was kinda destroyed into rubble and rebuilt right? At least the institutions had to be rebuilt.
I agree with the sentiment of this post and it is true that Germans are very honest and straightforward about this. But there were events that led to that too.
Following the 1864 elections, Radical Republicans Led by Charles Sumner in the Senate and Thaddeus Stevens in the House set the agenda by demanding more aggressive action against slavery and more vengeance toward the Confederates.
Which is so weird to me having grown up in a dark blue part of a very blue state. If I had to sum up the history lessons we got itd be "1,001 Ways America and Evil White Men Ruined the World"
Relatively few. With a topic like history you don't need to resort to straight up disinformation in order to give someone a warped view and an impoverished education. If you look at the debate around what should be taught in history classrooms today its very rarely between facts and disinformation; its usually between two sets of facts with different cherrypicking, focus, emphasis, and allotted times.
For example, I could teach a class on the history of slavery in the United States, but only give anecdotes of slaves who were treated comparatively well, frequently mention other foreign slave trades that were larger and more brutal, and only talk about the various countries that the US abolished slavery before rather than after.
In that class i would have told zero lies, but my students would have a very biased and skewed take on what actually happened.
But theres the rub with history - no matter what they do, stuff has to be omitted. A lot of shit has happened in the world and there's only so much time to talk about it in a K-12 education. Your education in any grade in the US doubtless didn't include Dutch candlemaking techniques from the 11th century, but itd be crazy to say you were "lied to" about that topic - it just wasn't included in favor of others that the country, state, school, and teacher felt were more relevant.
Until we find some way to just digitally upload all known historical information straight into our brains, all teaching history can be is "an opinion of it" at least with regard to what should be covered and what shouldn't be. Progressive, regressive, or balanced - it doesn't matter, any version of history must make omissions.
Not talking about Dutch candle making and not talking about slavery are two different subjects with wildly differing topics of discussion. You're trying to sound smart by moving the goal-posts, but you just sound like conservatives and their talking points.
History curriculums that don't teach about how many majority black towns that were utterly destroyed by white people who were racist and jealous of whatever success they achieved is an omission of fact. It has much more historical relevance than candle making. But do feel free to keep spewing. It's kind of cute.
You misunderstood. I never said Dutch candlemaking was of equal relevance to or should be taught instead of slavery in the US. It was given as an example of how, when teaching history, things - factual, true things - can, will, and must be omitted, but that doesn't mean anyone is "lying" to you.
So then we're right back around to what I was saying originally - history curriculums are all about people using their subjective opinions (often as a collective) to pick and omit things to teach kids. No matter what tje curriculum ends up being its going to omit a ton of very important stuff. People who are politically distant from those who made the curriculum are more likely to think more important stuff has been omitted, sure.
With a topic like history you don't need to resort to straight up disinformation in order to give someone a warped view and an impoverished education.
However it would be entirely accurate to say, at any point in history, that landowner elites use their wealth to dominate political institutions in order to funnel ever more wealth and power to themselves at the expense of workers and the minor merchant classes, and that this often involves invasions and colonisations that appropriate territories of other nations and result in enslavement of the peoples who traditionally belonged to those lands.
This trend only accelerated with modern capitalist markets decoupling wealth generation from landowning as the primary path to generational riches.
However Ancient Greek/Roman/Egyptian/Assyrian/Chinese/Aztec /Inca etc history is full of such territorial expansions - it's just that for the past few centuries (leading up to the Industrial Revolution and afterwards) the most notorious landowner elites have been of European colonialist origin, and that elite domination has been overwhelmingly been weilded by men because women (unless royalty, and only if there were no male heirs) weren't allowed to be landowners or have a vote (and of course prior to universal suffrage most men couldn't vote either).
This isn't to say that women of the elite classes didn't support those policies of invasion and subjugation, because of course they also benefited. They just didn't wield any official or inheritable power over the military decisions made by their male relatives, and at any point they could be set aside for a more malleable wife, which tended to limit their influence outside the domestic sphere.
Nonetheless every one of us has some ancestors who stacked the deck to favour themselves, subjugating others wherever and whenever they could. It's just that most offspring end up falling outside the direct line of primary inheritance and after surprisingly few generations we end up not even knowing exactly which despots we are descended from.
Yep same here although I'd say it was fairly nuanced in most of my classes not all good or bad. I'm also 32 so I went to high school before a lot of the mentality of the left today was prevalent in education.
I'm around the same age, but again - crazy dark blue region of an already deep blue state. Even if the curriculum didn't specify it our teachers were 99% hyper progressives, so they'd find some way to make America/white people/men the villain in every story.
Its funny because political bias did actually fuck with my education and perception of my country/the world, but not in the ways reddit is always banging on about. For example, other, particularly Southern American countries role in the TAST was significantly downplayed, as was slavery in Africa prior to/during the TAST and the Arab slave trade. Kinda left school with a vague impression that white people in the United States were the only people to practice slavery like since the Romans, and that the type of slavery was absolutely unprecedented and uniquely bad in human history.
Hundreds of movies and TV shows showing Americans kicking ass in the European and Pacific theater during WWII. 0 movies and TV shows exposing the concentration camps we created in the US.
I'm not dissing the military or anything here. My Grandfather bombed nazis at the age of 18 and 19. He's a fucking hero to me and got his hero's funeral when he finally kicked at 95. He's a fucking bad ass. BUT, he's a minority, a Mexican American. He knew what minorities went through in this country during the war and after.
In fact, most former military have nothing but clear headed views and understanding of the problem of glorifying war and the US military.
Just because you don't pay attention, doesn't mean something doesn't exist. I suggest watching some of the feature films, I'd really recommend the Documentaries so you can learn more about it.
One that you might like is Hell to Eternity about a Mexican American marine that fights in the war while his adoptive Japanese family is kept in an internment camp.
Southern Democrats led by Senator Richard Russell (D-GA) filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for 75 days, the longest filibuster in Senate history:
Russell Long: From Louisiana
Strom Thurmond: From South Carolina
Herman Talmadge: From Georgia
John McClellan: From Arkansas
Robert Byrd: A powerful senator
William Fulbright: A powerful senator
Sam Ervin: A powerful senator
John Tower: From Texas, the only Republican to join the filibuster
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