Comment by WalterBright
Comment by WalterBright 5 days ago
I went through public elementary and high school. The amount of world history taught there is vanishingly small.
Just for fun, ask some high schoolers who were the major combatants in WW2.
Comment by WalterBright 5 days ago
I went through public elementary and high school. The amount of world history taught there is vanishingly small.
Just for fun, ask some high schoolers who were the major combatants in WW2.
I've also seen "history" taught in high school that the middle class only emerged after FDR.
(The middle class thrived in colonial America.)
Freshman physics in college blew through 2 years of high school honors physics in a week.
What's taught in public schools is pretty thin gruel. That said, I enjoyed school, as all my friends were there and we had a good time.
> What's taught in public schools is pretty thin gruel.
It's pretty thin gruel at many private schools too. The limiting factor in either case is that most kids are there because they are made to go, not self directed. Money does not buy motivation, but it buys access.
20th century history was covered in depth because much of it can be taught with an American Exceptionalism slant easily. I'm more talking about pre-Roman Empire times.
Though you just reminded me of a co-worker I had while I was in University. She had attended a private Christian High School and apparently world history was optional there because (we worked at a movie rental place) when Valkyrie released I commented on how I didn't care to watch it because I already knew how it would end. She asked what I meant and how I knew, and I had to explain that since Hitler survived the bombing attempt to shoot himself in his bunker at the end of WW2 (or be shot, or fake it, whatever your chosen explanation/conspiracy) in Europe that Tom Cruise's character pretty obviously had to fail. She had _no idea_. I was pretty baffled. My grandad enlisted in the army in the tail end of WW2. 2 generations back. And she knew nothing about it except that it had happened.
None of the history classes in grade/high school I attended advanced after 1900.
However, I knew a lot about WW2 because my dad (and relatives) was heavily involved in it, and also became a historian when he left the AF. He had a mountain of history books, mostly about aviation and WW2. I read some of them, and watched movies like "The Blue Max" and "The Battle of Britain", the "World At War" series, and so on. There are also endless WW2 documentaries on TV.
My neighbor was a paratrooper who lost his leg, my dad's best friend was a P-51 pilot who had his face burned off in combat. WW2 vets were everywhere. They're all dead now, and WW2 is ancient history.
> The amount of world history taught there is vanishingly small. Just for fun, ask some high schoolers who were the major combatants in WW2.
That is an example of poor teaching of historical facts. It's bad (especially in our current times when people have forgotten the perils of fascism), but it's different than what the GP describes, which sounds like the biblical literalist timeline of life on Earth (with creation happening only 6000 years ago).
That is not just poor education, but instead direct contradiction of widely understood knowledge that much of our modern world is built on.
To use your WW2 example, it's similar to explicitly teaching someone that the Holocaust didn't happen. Or in the scientific realm teaching that the earth is flat.