Comment by Terr_ 4 days ago
> spending so much time learning about native Americans and so little time learning math
After a bunch of years overseas, I returned to the US to complete my last two years of high school.
I was shocked and dismayed by how much time (and stupid memorization-minutiae) was dedicated solely to the 4 years of the US Civil War.
Not sure how it is today but in the late 90s it felt like we had a section about Nazis and WW2 every year in high school (in Germany). Yes, I get it, it's important - but it's not important to rehash it every year for 9 years.
That said, overall I was pretty happy with history class.
>The remarkable thing is that Americans don’t understand their own civilization... some supposed connection between the Constitution and some Indian tribe.
The Iroquois Confederacy. Irony.
> some supposed connection between the Constitution and some Indian tribe
Do you mean the Great Law of the Haudenosaunee [1]? I.e., the constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy? The place where the founding fathers of the US got the idea of separation of powers? The form of government of one of the major regional powers at the time the US was formed? Don't know why your daughter's teachers would bother teaching her about that. Sure, it's awful if they were neglecting all those other things, but seriously, anyone learning American colonial-era history needs to learn about the Iroquois Confederacy.
> The place where the founding fathers of the US got the idea of separation of powers?
This reads a bit more like spinning a noble savages tale rather than the much more obvious explanation being that the founders were building on the proven greco-roman models and various Enlightmentment figures - as they directly state in a number of federalist papers.
I don't think the "noble savage" idea applies in this case. The problem of the noble savage idea is that it portrays indigenous people as simple, pure, and uncorrupted, while overlooking that indigenous people are complex just like non-indigenous people.
It's no myth that the Haudenosaunee and other indigenous people had sophisticated governments that could have inspired the writers of the US Constitution. The Haudenosaunee's democracy-ish form of government extends back probably a thousand years. The people who wrote the US Constitution had contact with these people. The exact extent to which this shaped the Constitution is up for debate, of course.
Yes, the US government draws from European roots too. I hope my kids learn about both the Magna Carta and the Great Law of Peace.
> The place where the founding fathers of the US got the idea of separation of powers?
That would be a synergy of ideas primarily found in Polybius, Montesquieu, and the extant British constitution.
Not to discount the value of teaching about the political system of the Iroquois -- that's an interesting a valid topic to cover in school -- but it's not appropriate to attempt to link it to the US Constitution in a way that's wholly speculative and tenuous, and do so at the expense of properly teaching about the actual ideas that factored into the development of the constitution.
It was from the extensive intellectual discourse on separation of powers during the English civil war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_powers
The single greatest influence on American society is what was going on in Britain in the mid 17th century and Americans learn absolutely nothing about it in school. It’s like writing a history or MacOS X that doesn’t mention NeXT.
> dedicated solely to the 4 years of the US Civil War.
And don't even start on how little is dedicated to explain slavery and the social and economic ramifications until the late 20th century. Or how the native people were actively suppressed during the expansion to the West, and how all that lead to some of the current social and economic structures around predominantly Native American groups.
My daughter's middle school science class spent a month and a half chewing through water and rock cycle. I don't think geology is in her future.
> I was shocked and dismayed by how much time (and stupid memorization-minutiae) was dedicated solely to the 4 years of the US Civil War.
Really? I remember the Civil War being a unit (significantly less than a semester) in US History, which was one class in my sophomore year of high school.
The remarkable thing is that Americans don’t understand their own civilization. They don’t learn anything substantive about the founding U.S. cultures (big differences between Puritans and Jamestown settlers). They don’t study European history as a required course so they know almost nothing about how the modern world came to be (Westphalian nation states, etc). And they learn almost no world history beyond ancient civilizations (native Americans, ancient Egyptians, etc).
I spend $33,000 a year on my daughter’s education and she was telling me about some supposed connection between the Constitution and some Indian tribe—but she has no idea what the Magna Carta is, or what the political structure was of the UK that we declared independence from, who Plato is, etc. My mom was more educated as a girl in a desperately poor Muslim country in the 1950s than my daughter in an affluent DC region private school.