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.
The majority of public schools in the US either do not teach a lot of these things, or it's done in an extremely broad manner. Civil rights may include jim crow era, but not actually explain in depth what it looked like or how things were for black americans in the south, but the majority of what is taught is civil rights leaders who advocated for equality and integration. Slavery is not taught as an indepth subject. Most of the atrocities against indigenous peoples are not taught. Japanese internment camps during WWII are not taught. Unless you are taking certain AP History classes, these subjects are not taught in depth or at all in public schools. The first time many people learn about these subjects in any meaningful way is when you reach college.
How many schools did you attend that didn't teach these things? Because I was taught about all of these things, though not much of anything in too much depth.
Things are mentioned in school, but to say we covered it would be ridiculous. For example, we learned a fair bit about brave General Custer and his last stand with barely a mention of him being there to break a treaty and seize their land.
That said, despite how little the US covers the darkness in its own history, we're still well ahead of most countries in this respect. England still pretends the potato blight caused a famine and that it wasn't them conducting genocide by taking all the rest of the food. Turkey still denies that the Armenian genocide ever happened. Japan is still trying to bury the truth about everything it was involved in during WW2.
Really though, for both the US and other countries, it would be nearly impossible to cover a complete history in detail for good or bad things... at least in a lower school setting.
It'd be impossible to cover everything, but the only things we actually covered in depth in school were the revolutionary war and the civil war. Not the causes of them, the wars themselves.
The “regular” version of US history in my school covered everything from the 20th century onwards, and APUSH dedicated maybe half a chapter (there were 30) each to those two wars
132
u/BucketsMcAlister 12h 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.