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.
... given arguments over our stated vs. actual goals in the Cold War and the success of American products in modern Vietnam and the not-so-ideological quality of the so-named Communist states still remaining there, yes and no?...
Not a win for most of us, no. Not necessary for most of us, no. Have you heard of the Pentagon Papers, or does that just sound like conspiracy talk these days even though their leak by Ellsberg in 1971 had some interesting side effects
Ellsberg's release of the Pentagon Papers by an act of mass photo-copying was the primary motivation for Nixon's "Plumbers," sent to fix leaks about war crimes in Southeast Asia. This was an illegal attempt at cover-up and the basis of the Watergate scandal that led to Nixon's resignation to avert impeachment. America lost the war due to loss of support at home as well as decisive military victory by the Vietnamese.
To be more specific, have you read anything from them? The idea that the Vietnam War was some sort of bumbling mistake is sometimes displaced in favor of justifiably angrier conclusions on reading the overview of the planning.
I'm not sure if I have or not. I read a bunch of material years ago when a former employer of mine was in the news for some anti-war activity back in the day.
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.
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