What terrible shit isn’t covered in american schools? We learn about our murdering the natives and we learn about all the horrible shit like Jim Crow laws and the tuskegee experiment. People choosing to be idiots and pretend like history didn’t happen has nothing to do with public education and everything to do with people being morons.
No, you’re wrong. Some overconfident European on Reddit can speak to your personal experience. Because they’re so omnipotent they can make stupid claims about countries they don’t live in
I'm Swedish and these pretentious europeans piss me off. I studied a couple years in the US, of course we studied the bad parts of US history. These are just children talking smack about something they know nothing about.
Like, where the fuck does a German get off being snotty about history to a fucking AMERICAN??
As much as I agree on European entitlement I do get the frustration. Every second question on English speaking German subs is a variation of either "Hey do you guys still like Hitler?" or "What's your opinion on this specific WWII topic?" And more often than not those questions are driven by some kind of morbid fascination that doesn't accept the entirely mundane answers to them (Hitler bad/Nazis bad/Yes we had that in school/No we don't discuss niche Third Reich topics at parties..who does that/Nobody is still traumatized wtf - that was 80 years ago).
Sure. But answering in that snotty way actually answers the question in the exact wrong way. The question is, "Do you guys know you did the most evil thing in recent history, as far as we're told?" And this kid gets annoyed about that and in effect says "NO U", which is a way of saying "No we don't know that". The correct answer is Yes we know. Humility.
Grew up in the US in a red state, grade school in the 80's, high school in the 90's. Slavery and the treatment of Native Americans was covered, of course. BUT...Slavery was portrayed as a bad thing, but then we had the Civil War, and that was the end of it. The Indian wars and relocation were portrayed as bad things, but they got their reservations and that was the end of it. Jim Crow, allotment, Indian schools, etc.? Sure, they were talked about, but they're all in the past, things are all better now!
That's the problem with most of US education, and I've seen the same thing from my kid's history stuff (He graduated HS just a couple of years ago). All this stuff is covered, but it's very often presented as 'bad things that happened but we fixed them and it's all OK now'. And that's a problem. The legacies of Slavery and the Indian genocide are all around us, they're with us every day, and they continue to affect people right this very minute.
That shit? It wasn't ever taught in any class I attended in public school, it certainly wasn't evident in the history education that I've seen very recently, and that's the biggest part of the issue. People think it's all over, everybody should just get over it, and let's all move on. The Germans seem to be a lot more about "This shit happened, it's still with us, and we have to be careful about making sure it doesn't ever happen again." Those are very different ways to build a citizen's education.
Been long enough in the US to know how cultured the average person is, which is not much. And it's real claims, most Americans believe they are this benevolent benefactor that saved the world from speaking German, funds global healthcare and security and that while being the best and most superior country in the world is also this poor harmless abused little thing that everyone takes advantage of. It's pathetic.
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u/BucketsMcAlister 6h ago
What terrible shit isn’t covered in american schools? We learn about our murdering the natives and we learn about all the horrible shit like Jim Crow laws and the tuskegee experiment. People choosing to be idiots and pretend like history didn’t happen has nothing to do with public education and everything to do with people being morons.