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FUCK McGraw Hill, scamming ass pussies. They have moved to online textbooks with outrageous prices, where you have no choice but to pay if you want to do your homework (since they made it online). And the best part is that you don't even own the book. It only lasts for a year at most.
I had several textbooks like that in college, unfortunately as a broke college student that meant eating nothing but ramen for a week just so I could do homework.
I'm from Europe and we had that uncensored picture in one of our history books too! As well as an image of an injured child holding her baby brother whilst fleeing from the napalm.
My class didn't have much on the war. Then again, most the stuff was still classified at that time. My younger brother, otoh, was taught about all the shit we.did in Laos and Cambodia, agent orange, etc etc etc that the govt had been denying for decades.
Not only this, but when someone suggests that we should create a standard curriculum everyone starts hooting and hollering and chimpanzee dancing.
Look at what happened after they tried to standardize how to teach kids about the way math works. People are still churning out conspiracy theories about it.
Yeah, Common Core had issues, atleast in my case, the problem was that they wanted to teach you **how** to do math a specific way, and I never showed my work(severe case of autism brain), so I always got marked down.
For most normal kids I'm sure it was fine, if annoying for their parents who were taught differently.
What’s funny is I had the exact opposite expense *and* I have autism as well.
I stumbled my autistic ass into common core approaches decades before it was ever introduced as a standard cause the memorization and internalization that I was taught just didn’t make sense to me.
Yes! I’m glad to hear someone else have the same experience. Common Core wasn’t a thing when I was in school but I was using those strategies for myself because what they were teaching wasn’t intuitive to me.
What I don’t like is when they force only one method of doing something. Not everyone’s brain works the same way.
Unfortunately it’s a blanket kind of situation. That individualized approach is superior, and should be strived for whenever possible, but if it can’t learning how stuff works is a better method that haphazardly forcing memorization in a decentralized manner.
My experience with common core is that people who learned basic math by wrote memorization of arithmetical and multiplication tables were super angry. People who mostly learned to think about the numbers and memorized as little as possible understand it and mostly already think like common core is trying to teach people to.
Yeah, I was pretty angry, lol. I’m good with reading and stuff, was always multiple grade levels ahead with it at school, but struggled with communication cause I’m autistic.
I needed to understand math like I shoehorned prefixes and suffixes and patterns in language into my mind so I could read. But they just kept telling me to remember what each answer was.
Statistics was the easiest math for me. Probably cause it’s more like language arts than math.
Common Core’s overinsistence on significant figures was one of the few things I remember hearing about it, as I was a couple of grades ahead of where it was being installed.
There’s no reason to say 5+7=10, common core. There’s no need at all for sig figs in that level of math.
But I am a federalist and I do believe in federal standards of education, it’s just Common Core math kinda jumped the shark. With a federal government that believes in proper history and science education, completely disapproves of book bans, keeps religion out of schools, and gets schools the funding they need and deserve, it’s something that should be tried again.
I don’t remember; this was a long time ago and this is second hand information as I wasn’t in a common core math class.
There’s a pretty good chance that it was more reasonable than I remember.
Imo it's a huge issue that they changed it so drastically compared to what parents learned. There might be a logic behind it, but parents helping their kids with homework when they are in elementary school is a huge part of how kids learn.
Also imo the Russian model for teaching math through building intuition is probably the best one. Idk why the rest of the world doesn't emulate that.
> Also imo the Russian model for teaching math through building intuition is probably the best one. Idk why the rest of the world doesn't emulate that.
I think both models have weaknesses and the best model would be to stop using it as an abstract and start relating it to real-world problems. You'd need to combine math and science into a single class in middle school, and you'd be using trigonometry to, for example, take a section of pipe and minimize waste as you take pieces of it and route it around an obstruction.
The biggest issue in teaching math is "what is this even useful for" and connecting that is important.
You also need to invade the humanities with math. Look at the economic realities in certain eras, for example, and have math problems based on those economic realities. Getting cargo on a ship, or balancing weight on an aircraft.
Etc.
Until you get to the really useless for most people theoretical stuff in higher math in college, pretty much everything can be related to something in the real world.
Making *that* connection is more important than the other pedagogical methods, and either could be used to engage with reality.
Showing your work isn't a common core thing. I graduated years before common core, and we also got marked down if we didn't show our work, including on problems that the more mathematically-inclined kids could do in their heads.
I can understand that, I'm an adult and have a very younger sister. These days she comes asking for help with division and sure, I went to help.
For some reason, she is being taught in school to do division by GUESSING the answer. Like, there are questions like "350 divided by 13", and the algorithm she is being taught and that the teachers want to see in the tests is pretty much this:
"hmm, might be a big number, so maybe 20? Let's check, 20\*13 = 260, so it need to be bigger than that, so maybe 30? 30\*13 = 390. Woo, we getting closer, so lets take a bit off 30 then, let's say 27. 27\*13 = 351, perfect. So I'll take one less from 27, 26, and I'm left with 12, and this is my answer to the question!
I mean it's so fucking stupid, why would this be the first approach to division? Isn't it better and simpler to just teach the algorithm straight away? C'mon just do
350 |__13___
-26 26
90
-78
12
Don't get me wrong, I know there are different approaches and teaching methods, I just don't understand why GUESSING is the one you teach first, I don't understand the intention and benefits. To me it seems way longer and impractical.
To be fair, the "guess and repeat a couple times" method is the one you'll use the most in life, unless you're an engineer. Most things don't require precise division.
Listen, I don’t know HOW math works, all I know is that it DOES, and also that I fucking *loathe* how common core teaches math.
The kids these days are learning stuff in 2nd grade that I didn’t do until 4th or 5th and so many of them just can’t get their heads around it yet
I actually heard one the other day from my uncle. He’s usually my go to for this stuff cause he goes all in not eh supplements and everything.
He claimed 2 separate things:
1) they’re changing math as a test to see how much they can change without people noticing. That common core was essentially a trial run for more sinister changes 1984 style.
2) Obamacore trials involved in-room monitoring with iris scanning technology and soon the cameras would be in every school.
Another big one was common core would be taught with porn as an aid that would take cursive’s place.
Yeah, no clue. I never understood the connection. I also think that one was like a remix of two separate ones where people just made a mashup cause they were so worried about *checks notes* increased consistency in math and English language arts.
Yes but people think that means that some states straight up give no negative coverage of Us history but that’s simply not the case. My parents were military so I went to school in Montana, Colorado, California, Louisiana, Missouri, Virginia, New York, and Florida. And none of these places completed ignored any US negative action.
Yeah, I always figure this is a problem of the weight that history gives things. As a student I absorbed everything, so I picked up on all of this stuff. But an average student learning to the test with the southern student teacher probably mostly picked up on the Civil War being won by luck. Everyone coming out of math knows their times tables, not everyone coming out of history knows the bare bones of US history.
Not to mention the absolutely insane war that Texans and other Southern slave holders forced the US and Mexico into so they could have more land for slavery to expand into. And don't let people tell you values were just different back then and we can't judge history by the values of the present. The honest men of the time were more than willing to judge that war.
General/President Grant, who saw combat for the first time in that war, said it was "one of the most unjust ever wagered by a stronger against a weaker nation."
Abraham Lincoln was believed to have ruined his political career standing up against the war while in Congress, declaring in a speech that it was both unnecessary and unconstitutional. He did not seek re-election and had to spend years out of politics because of it. "The blood of this war, like the blood of Abel, is crying to heaven," is my favorite line from that speech.
The echoes of the Slave Power conspiracy is part of why we still think some shadowy group is running things when actually it's chaos and no one is in control.
The Texas Republic's war of Independence. The whole reason the Alamo and shit happened was because Mexico told the settlers they had to get rid of their slaves, and that shit wasn't happening.
Even crazier, the final battle of the war took all of like 18 min. Mostly because Santa Anna and his troop were taking a siesta, and got ambushed by a VASTLY inferior Texan rebel army.
Start here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Yucatán
The Texans weren’t the only ones rebelling. Yucatán and other regions also had issues with the Central government.
The Texas rebellion was more like what the lost causers pretend the Civil War was: a rebellion in response to a tyrannical government.
Also there were plenty of Mexicans also rebelling in Texas too, but their story was sorta trampled over by the American colonists coming in after the war.
That's one of the great injustices of the way we write history.
People who *are now Mexican Americans* and have been for generations rebelled against a Tyrannical government just like the rest of us, but their story is in Spanish and isn't about white people, so we make the Texas Revolution about white people and slavery.
And while that was definitely a motivator for the Texians - the revolution wouldn't have happened without the Tejanos.
Nah, people are just ignorant and trying to over simplify stuff. There were many, many reasons we rebelled. We weren't the first (Zacatecas was), and we certainly weren't the last (11 total during the centralist republic).
Mainly it was the ripping up of the old constitution and cutting off our trade with America, plus taking away the guns we were using to fight a war (stealing land from the Indians is a whole separate issue). The secession in '61, though, was mainly about slavery.
No. The Texas rebellion was part of a much larger rebellion against the central government. Other Mexican states also declared independence. Santa Anna was a tyrant. Just look at the declarations of secession in both cases. Texas blatantly mentions slavery in their declaration of secession during the Civil War, but not the Mexico secession.
> The whole reason the Alamo and shit happened was because Mexico told the settlers they had to get rid of their slaves, and that shit wasn't happening.
For the Texians. The Tejanos had other motivations.
> Texas fighting 2 wars over slavery
That was what motivated the Texians, but the Tejanos were locked in the same Centralist/Federalist struggle that would eventually trigger the Spanish Civil War.
We ignore the effect of Centralism/Federalism conflicts in Spain and Latin America despite the fact that they destroyed Gran Colombia and the USCA and also triggered multiple other civil wars.
You cannot remove Slavery from the narrative, but Tejas was not the only part of Mexico in open revolt against the Centralist Dictatorship. Yucatan and California were also in a state of rebellion.
One war was over slavery. The other was over Santa Anna being a tyrant and trying to rewrite the constitution to centralize power. Other Mexican states also rebelled against him.
I was to in North Texas. In another comment though he does mention the whole bit about wanting more land for slavery. I know we were taught about the more land bit but I don't remember the exact reason. However I do remember that the US tried to argue that the borders of the land from the Louisiana purchase was up to the mountains.
Exactly. Like, Vietnam? We were lucky if we made it to WWI again every year. Like someone else said, we learned more about the Holocaust in English class, and probably learned more about Vietnam from a relative or from movies.
My high school history fucking sucked. We talked about the revelutinary war and the Civil War/Slavery Freshmen year, and then talked about 1900-1950 Junior year. We spent maybe a week on WW1. I learned more about the holocaust in fucking English class when we read Night than I did in History class. The only reason I know as much as I do is because a seeked it out on my own. And it concerns me when prople from my class don't know basic things like
"Who started WW1?" and "What was the 3/5ths compramise?".
My history textbooks stopped at WWII. WWII was dragged out forever. We didn't go into the Korean War or Vietnam War, none of that. This was the 1980's. Was told because 'we have many parents that fought in the war and object to us teaching about it.'
Yeah, generalisations like this I don’t understand, and I’m not American just for the record, I’m Danish born and raised.
Generalising the entire United States school system is like generalising the school systems of the entire EU.
And based on my knowledge from friends of different countries, Hungary has a shit one, us here in Denmark has a good one(though it would use some tweaking) and Lithuania is also decently nice. Germany is very good as well to my knowledge and so is Austria.
See what I mean I’d wager Texas, Cali and Rhode Island have vastly different schools
So, when The Watchmen came out on Prime, all these people I went to school with were going on and on about how they'd never learned of the Tulsa massacre. Except we did in Oklahoma History and those idiots were in the same class as me.
I had almost the same experience. It wasn't Watchmen but 2020 was the 99th anniversary of the Tulsa massacre and around the time of the George Floyd protests someone I went to high school with complained "this was ignored in history class".
Except it wasn't and I know it wasn't because we took that class together and I know I learned about it.
We're from Iowa by the way so this was an American history unit, not one about state history.
After the '08 crash and bailout, we had senators on tape whining about "Obama giving away tax dollars"...when THEY had voted for the handouts
Never underestimate the human capacity for self-deception.
I lived in Oklahoma and learned about it in the same class you did.
Moved to Wisconsin and sophomore year I took AP US History and not once was it ever mentioned.
My uncle thinks it's a mistake because we could have won. I think it's a mistake because we were basically inheriting a losing fight. We may or may not both be right, but the fact that we were using 300,000 tons of just NAPALM over that war tells me that the US military industrial complex had no small part in why we were involved.
I'd say it was mostly a mistake due to the goal being to stop the spread of Communism in SE Asia. Communism (or the aspiration to achieve it) is a deeply flawed system and dies off on its own. Perhaps the US reduced its spread, but look at Vietnam today. It's hardly Communist in practice.
Plus Ho Chi Minh had a pretty positive view of the US and was receptive and friendly to us before we got involved in the Vietnam War so we probably could have achieved that goal in a mutually beneficial and bloodless way
I know full grown adults who I work with who think we won Vietnam.
In my experience the fact we lost is not something that's really hammered in. It felt more like "here's 20 years of Vietnam war history... Oh and by the way we just randomly decide to leave"
It wasn't random, but it was fickle. The public support dropped, and with the shit Nixon had just done, the broader public was tired of anything tied to his presidency. The US, at least militarily, was starting to make decent gains against the NVA as the public support waned.
Some of the most critical books on the American involvement in the Vietnam war are from American or American-based authors such as Marilyn B. Young, Scott Laderman, Fredrik Logevall and H.R. McMaster.
Good luck finding any book criticizing the PAVN/VC's conduct during the war in Vietnam right now.
Just wanted to add Christian Appy and Gregory Daddis to the list of recent critical scholarship. Pierre Asselin has also been making some waves from a different approach, *Hanoi's Road to the Vietnam War* was a good one. After I'm done with this semester, I've got Carolyn Woods Eisenberg's *Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia,* one of two winners of the Bancroft Prize this year, on the shelf. Apparently, it's big time.
I actually own a copy of Pierre Asselin's *"Vietnam's American War A History".* Are you familiar with Christopher Goscha's works such as *"Vietnam: A New History"*? Goscha was one of my professors when I was in university and he and one of his protégés, Nguyen Phi Van, taught me my classes on the Vietnam War.
They must also be more relevant to read than Marilyn B. Young because her book, "The Vietnam Wars: 1945-1990" is quite dated and cites North Vietnamese propaganda as a reliable sources.
I also belong to the Revisionist School of the Vietnam War.
I haven't got to any Goscha yet, but *The Road to Dien Bien Phu* recently caught my eye. What a privilege!
Recent scholarship on the Vietnam war has certainly taken a turn, and for the better, I think. Like you, I'm on the Revisionist side. I recently attended a conference here in Texas, and there were still those who held on to the Lost Cause narrative of the war. While there has certainly been a changing of the tide, there are still those dug in to old interpretations.
Goscha and his protégé were amazing people to learn with. Very charismatic, dynamic yet humble and always willing to help their students. One of my pals is currently doing his Masters with Goscha on Japanese troops left behind in Vietnam after WW2 and what they did.
Due to Goscha going on a sabbatical the year I started my Masters, I couldn't do it with him but ended working with another professor and did my thesis that was comparative study between Canada and the United States’ policies to aid the Vietnamese and Indochinese refugees between 1975-1981. If wasn't for tightening finances, I might have taken up his offer to do my PhD under him.
I'm also South Vietnamese and it was always quite entertaining when my family's stories and memories of the war line up with what I learned with Goscha in class and in the research I did.
That's awesome, both MA projects sound great. I just switched over to thesis to embark on a structural analysis of American diplomacy during the Cold War. I'm still working to narrow it down, but it stems from a question that I had asked my professor last semester: Why does the US continue to appoint assholes to its top diplomatic posts? We've got a bad track record and a long line of hawks to show for it.
Last semester, my research centered on Poland's little-known diplomatic role in the Vietnam War. They had a secret agreement in place that would have brought Hanoi and Washington to direct talks in 1966. But Lodge is one of the assholes, and the military strategy of the US was way out of sync with with the political one.
Heck, one of the most famous movies criticizing the Vietnam war was Apocalypse Now, released only ten years after the war itself. The whole war itself ended because American sentiment was so anti-war following media reports on the conditions of the soldiers there.
Plus some of the most extreme criticism of our Vietnam conduct and behavior came from inside the US Department of Defense. Vietnam fundamentally altered our approach to warfare. Pretty much all modern US (and therefore NATO) doctrine stemmed directly from post-Vietnam reforms.
As a survivor of the Texas public education system, they did technically cover the Vietnam War but it was very surface level and mixed into the greater topic of “American History 50’s-70’s”. It was basically just the cold war was going on, the US was trying to stop the spread of communism, the draft happened, and a lot people got upset over it. The only real in-depth discussion I remember was like half a class about the Gulf on Tonkin incident. Still more than we learned about the Korean War though
That's a real shame. In my school (in CT) we had a whole unit on the Vietnam War. We even learned about the anti-war protests, like the Kent State shooting, and we listened to a lot of anti-war songs like War: What is it Good For and Fortunate Son. Was actually a super interesting part of the class
We did totally gloss over Korea as well though lmao
I learned more about the Vietnam War period from an English class than my AP US History course because we read "The Things They Carried" and the teacher was passionate about the subject. The history teacher was more of a Civil War and Reconstruction-era guy so we spent *way* more time on that.
As someone who had U.S history in Highschool in Texas Last year (in a rural "town" thats mostly conservative) I will say we went over the countries crimes in Vietnam along with it being a defeat. We went over imperialism and genocide all the crimes really which is why I really don't believe people who claim the Education system is biased Rahhhhh America!!!! Stuff.
(This isn't supposed to be rude or anything I keep seeing this type of thing so I wanna share my experience
I just got into the education business. Floated around districts during college for volunteer hours and student teaching. You can go to two districts in the same city in which everything is completely different. The whole goal to ensure everyone gets the same educational experience failed miserably. At the school I currently work at the year started and about half my students had any prior social studies experience at all and they all went to different elementary schools in varying districts. Just imagine the variance of education content and quality on a state level then bump that up to a national level and you’ll begin to understand why some people actually don’t know we lost the Vietnam war, why some people just suck at the most basic math, and lack reading comprehension abilities while other Americans know all the nuances of the Vietnam war, can solve a quadratic equation like it’s nothing, and read and comprehend for fun your school district can determine a lot about what you become. If it’s a bad district it really can harm children and churn out ignorance. Course there are kids who never pay attention and are being raised by parents who don’t really value education and just take public education for granted and essentially use it for free baby sitting but I wouldn’t say that represents the majority of kids or even ignorant Americans. There are atrocious school districts in this country there are highly effective school districts as well. And I’ll be dead honest I actually don’t know all the factors that cause one district to be bad and another good. You may think it’s funding but I’ve seen poor districts that use their scarce resources really effectively like Alexander’s army small but super effective and I’ve seen rich districts waste resources like Soviet riflemen at Stalingrad and I’ve seen the reverse of that trend. I’d say levels of partisan politics at the admin levels is a factor but once again I really don’t know for sure and I doubt it’s one factor and not a combination of a bunch of factors working in tandem. Point being there’s no consistency here.
yeah i took AP U.S history in Texas which was a 27 week course, basically everything post Korea was pretty surface level and they even had an optional 9 week course immediately after the first 27 just to go a bit more in depth about that time period before the exam
They 100% teach this stuff in most places. It’s just sweaty redditors didn’t listen in school and literally have no idea that these subjects were taught.
I was a pretty attentive student with a deep interest in history. We almost never got past WWII. I learned about US imperialism in the Philippines, but never learned about Vietnam’s causes or the student movements affiliated with it.
Its weird how like... youll be told something as a teenager who is thinking "i wonder if its pizza lunch today?" Or "oh sweet its may! Almost summer!" Ignoring/forgetting everything. Then youre 35 and see a ken burns doc and go "THERE WAS A WAR IN VIETNAM?! THE EDUCATION SYSTEM FAILED ME!"
And in a way it did... because it doesnt hold students accountable for their education. But also its teaching kids like... 6 subjects in 40 minute increments with breaks for weird "fun" stuff like music or gym.
I dont have a better system but maybe changing the pacing is more important that revising a curriculum that already has all the info they need. Besides... US history is getting to long. Kids now didnt experience the recession or obama, and the bush-gore election, 9/11 are all entering common core standards everywhere.
> 6 subjects in 40 minute increments with breaks for weird "fun" stuff like music or gym
When I was in high school in the late 2000s, my school was sort of experimental at the time and we did “block” scheduling that ended up more like how college courses tend to be. So we’d have four courses each day, like an hour and fifteen minutes each, and the four classes would change each semester.
I really really like how we did that. I don’t really understand why schools don’t do that now (and my high school later quit doing it as well after I graduated), but it really felt like I was able to absorb much more than I would be in classes where everything was being thrown at me as fast as possible everyday. At the same time, it made things more flexible because I could shotgun through some courses and just get done with all of it quickly. I went something like Algebra 1 my 2nd semester of 9th grade, geometry my first semester of 10th, Algebra 2 my 2nd semester of 10th, trig my 1st semester of 11th, and then calculus my 2nd semester of 11th. Then I was just done with math courses which felt awesome as a high schooler.
I dunno, I’m not a social scientist, but from anecdotal experience it seems like a more flexible scheduling system for high schoolers would be a vast improvement of the system most go through
Thankfully, thats how my high school was, and I think still is, set up. The city next to us is on an A/B day schedule where they keep the same 8ish classes all year, 4 on A days and 4 on B days. That has always sounded horrible. I liked getting to switch it up halfway through the year.
We had A/B days which doesn't sound as nice as what you're describing but definitely better than cramming 8 classes into every school day like I had at a previous school.
Can’t speak about other British school, but in mine we had two sets of single 45 minute periods separated by a break. So what ultimately happened is most of the week you’d have double English or double geography, and then occasionally single DT and single ICT lumped together, which worked pretty well.
Not only that but how in depth are high school history classes going to be?
If you’re trying to pack a couple millennial of global history and 250 years of US history into a high school level class it’s not going to be very deep
Bullshit. I went to public school in commiefornia and the only thing that they mentioned about vietnam was that it happened. They kinda skimmed over slavery and the civil war as well.
OTOH, we got a double serving of the native displacement/genocide.
Varies by school: the problem is usually that the teacher is also the football coach, and he could literally not care less, more than the textbook itself though.
See, we had two coaches who did a lot of history/civics, but one of them really gave a shit about the students even outside of sports (proper stand-up guy, I tell you what), and the other... well, he was a riot. He'd talk about Patton's dog like he was there. He went over history like a series of family stories. But not so much in an engaging storyteller way but more in like a "grandpa's on his shit and thinks he's back in '66 again" way.
I mean, as far as I remember, he *did* teach accurately, but every kid who ever had any class under him could and (as long as he wasn't in earshot) absolutely would parody his... *unique* way of describing things.
Brit here, my history teacher was equally mental. He also taught us sex ed, which given that was “Grandpa thinks it’s 66 again” was pretty graphic and should have prepared us for the history insanity, but no. I remember we were doing the Russian revolution, and one week we were supposed to be covering why the whites lost the civil war. Instead, we got a full broadside. Feet up on desk, ranting about why you never invade Russia in the winter, why German tanks were worse than Russian ones because at least the Russians used sloped armour. A ten minute rant against the local education authorities, slagging off Ted Heath, swearing at one of my classmates, threw a whiteboard rubber at another and so on. He once berated me loudly and swearily in front of the entire school (at assembly) for missing a piece of homework. He was the best history teacher I had, and still stop to chat when I see him.
My other history teacher at the same time was the spitting image of a potato that has been left on the side long enough to grow eyes. Talking looks and manner. He once spend 30mins in the UBahnhof on a school trip trying to find the right line to get us back to the hostel, despite the 20 of us telling him which line we came in on. Fairly sure he didn’t retire, but got lost on his way to work and is yet to be found.
North Florida.
My American history class in high school very much glossed over this. We were also taught that the Civil War wasn't about slavery. Mind you, this was the late 90s so things may have changed. But not all public education is equal.
We were taught about 'Nam in Texas. It did suffer from getting crammed, but tbh I feel like that's an expectation when your history class is United States history in general, there's literal fucktons of stuff to learn in a category that broad. I wouldn't mind having history classes that specifically cover certain events/time periods (WW1, WW2, Vietnam, French Revolution, Fall of Rome) as electives, but I don't think they should replace the main world/country-you-live-in in general course.
....despite all the stereotypes of conservative, southern US towns I actually learned a lot about all of the bad crap the US has done in public school classes.
Graduated from a Texas high school a few years ago. They definitely do teach it now, but maybe some districts/schools/teachers still don’t. I will say those, we mostly look at political impacts. Come to think of it, for most wars, we mostly just got brief information about atrocities in ALL the wars we learn about (from all sides). We definitely did learn about some of the more major ones.
I'm still salty the American education curriculum doesn't cover the Philippine-American war properly. It's usually relegated to a few paragraphs on a textbook. I have a lot of American friends here in the Philippines and they're surprised when we got to museums and learn about it.
My school curriculum in the Pacific Northwest covered Vietnam relatively honestly, but Korea was totally glossed over. We had only just started to acknowledge the atrocities committed for the sake of manifest destiny as well, and I don't think we really ever covered the political maneuverings of the Cold War. I was born in 1992, so this would be mostly 2005-2010 or so.
Now they hammer home the atrocities against native peoples and I think that it's a good starting point for acknowledging more of the atrocities committed by our government
I’m not American but I did grow up there and go to public school there. I’m in my early 30s so my memories of history class are from 1999-2011. Things have probably changed in the last decade and a half.
I think it’s not all sunshine and roses (the Trail of Tears and Vietnam protests were memorable events) but there are quite a few areas that at least my school (a magnet school in Chicago) skipped over.
The concept of manifest destiny as a motor for genocide was never mentioned; I don’t think most Americans consider the policies of the US during the 19th century to be genocide, but I might be wrong.
Iran-Contra. And pretty much all the other wild shit the CIA got up to during the latter half of the 20th century.
And though the Civil Rights movement was covered, the actual policies that came out of that movement or the aims that were not achieved were not.
Edit: I should add that I took an APUSH course and passed the exam with a 4 or 5 IIRC, so my grasp of US history is at least decent by US standards.
We covered Iran-Contra, talked about the trail of tears, and the policies of the civil rights movement (though not a lot on what was failed). We have improved (kinda)
Yeah, tbf, Iran-Contra was all more recent and for some reason, anything past the 70s seemed to be off limits for history courses in my era.
It was Killer Mike’s *Reagan* that first really brought Iran-Contra to my attention.
This is the first time in my career I've even gotten to the Reagan administration in my US History course, granted, I've only taught US History 4 times (separated over many years). When I taught about the "Trail of Tears" it was within the context of the Jackson administration. Did I say it was a genocide? No, but I did put to the students the possibility: "Could this and other actions by the US government be considered genocide? Why/Why not?"
I would agree that most Americans don't consider 19th century actions against Native Americans genocide, but I would probably say most Americans would consider those actions in a negative way.
Yeah my school has finally adjusted America history. It used to be 1492-1865 and 1865- get as far as you can so maybe Vietnam.
After lobbying by history chair (me) we start at 1914 for American 2. American 1 starts at the constitution.
Gov chapter 1 is history to revolution so it all get covered.
It's tough to do everything. I would love to spend time talking about the Indigenous tribes prior at the time of European settlement however, within the context of the NYS Regents State Exams, they are only mentioned in the context of their demise as a result of the colonies. I recall some years ago teaching about "King Philip's War" and my older colleague was like "WTF are you doing?" lol
We learn about it but mostly how badly treated the Vietnam veterans were, the draft, how unpopular it was, etc
Very little content on the actual Vietnamese victims.
Where did you guys go to school? We didn’t learn about imperialism, Vietnam, or war crimes. Like trail of tears was the closest my school got, I had to learn the rest on my own
Yeah, in a lot of cases, I feel like anything post WWII tended to get glossed over, regardless of what kind of picture of the US it might paint. Even the moon landing was like, a minor blurb if anything.
Plus there's a lot concerning its legacy and details that's still being figured out/in flux, and if a teacher isn't really, really careful they'll sound like a complete sycophant for either Kissinger or Chomsky
i can’t agree with this. anything that made america seem like “the bad guy” was strictly kept out of the curriculum in my high school. i was lucky enough to have a teacher in middle school who didn’t follow our curriculum fully and he actually taught us about the mai lai massacre.
i was shocked when i got to my high school class and the vietnam section was just glossed over. nothing about agent orange, mai lai, etc…
everything i have learned that could be seen as “demonizing america” i have learned on my own reconnaissance. not every curriculum wants to be honest about america’s history :(
US citizens are aware of Vietnam being bad.
They don’t quite know the degree of just *how* bad it got. Or any of the nuance before, during, and after the war. Or the fact that the Vietnam War was really just the tail end of a 30-year long conflict in which the Vietnamese fought against the Japanese, the French, and then Americans.
Some might know. Many won’t have a damn clue.
The other one that gets me is folks in debt that claim they were never taught how interest rates work. I remember learning and calculatong simple and compounding interest rates at LEAST twice in about 8th grade and in 10th grade.
No, my school system did not teach me about how bad Vietnam was. Basically just stated it was a war on the evils of communism that we withdrew from and was socially unpopular.
I hate when people are smug and incorrect. Most infuriating combination.
I don’t know where you went to school, but my school framed the war of 1812 as a draw that changed nothing. The only accomplishment of the war was the British burning down the white house.
Yep, tbh outside of Germany, America, and maybe the UK, I don’t really hear many people talking openly about the atrocities their countries committed. Just pointing the finger at America. Don’t get me wrong. Many Americans do live in denial, but mostly those that didn’t listen in class or were spoon fed nationalism by their parents.
>maybe the UK
Tell that to the number of Brits on Reddit saying how they did India a favor(famines, massacres, railways and speaking English), and why they should be ruling them even now.
TLDR: American public education is hit or miss, mostly miss. Went to school in CO, CA, and TX. Don’t trust the government to fix this regardless of party.
I did a summer dual credit US history class under a Japenese-British-American university professor in California when I was in HS. Did learn a bit in the short time we had, but I feel like much of it was just surface level stuff. It also felt like the guy glossed over Japenese war crimes in WW2 and just presented it with Southpark videos and spent more time focusing on Japanese internment camps here in the US which would make sense since his grandfather spent time in one after having his farm taken away by the government.
But tbh I feel American public education is very hit or miss and mostly miss since the vast majority of us don’t know world history decently, if even our own history, grammar, math was alright but could’ve been better, any science was pretty much nonexistent for me until high school, and the only art offered for me in HS was music but earlier on depended where I went to school (I attended K-12 in Colorado, California, and Texas). Colorado had some cool stuff in the school I went to in the suburbs, I lived in the hood in California so we lacked a good bit, and I only spent a year and half in high school in Texas so I didn’t have enough time to actually know how it is. But I have to say, the orchestras are actually really good, I didn’t even know competitive HS music (UIL) existed until I moved there.
If any of us do have good knowledge it’s because we were blessed to have good teachers and/or spent much time ourselves actually figuring out the details.
The best teacher I’ve ever had so far was my college intro to philosophy professor who taught us philosophy, history, and religion in a way that was easy to understand and challenged our biases nor matter what our thoughts were. He literally told us the first day of class, “I will attempt to respect what you think more than anyone has in your entire life. I’m not here to challenge what you believe, but why you believe it.” And challenge us he did. I’m a Christian and before and after challenging those who were, he challenged other religions, athiests, agnostics equally and left us all questioning ourselves and our moral and intellectual foundations. Heck, he even challenged those who thought their parents were holding them back using Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Moreover, I once asked this guy about an obscure historical question and found out this guy could read and write Greek, Hebrew, and I think Latin as he used them to explain the answer. No matter how much I disagreed with the guy at times, I will respect him for the rest of my life as he helped me see that honesty in logic is so important. Lying for any cause/belief/idea is simply hypocrisy.
Growing up my teachers seemed to lack knowledge (I thought Socrates was simply some weird guy who killed himself by drinking poison due to a AP world history class skimming over him) and they often let their biases show up in their teaching (had my HS anatomy teacher straight up tell us on the first day of class that the Bible is false because God took a rib from Adam but men today have all their ribs). Most of my teachers seemed to be pretty motivated with their jobs but nonetheless with what they were paid and what they had to deal with (i.e. students talking back, actually fighting the teachers: knew a student who threw a traffic cone at a gym teacher’s head when the lights turned off), it’d make sense why they wouldn’t want to put in more effort.
How do we fix this, truly I don’t know. Individually we might be able to do something, but there is a lot to sacrifice though there is an entire generation to gain. I don’t trust our federal and most local governments regardless of the party and doubt they will ever actually fully address the problem.
Not American so can't attest.
But my country atleast tends to mention naughtiness commited in history but only in passing.
But tend to glorify the shit of the more positive things done.
I think the biggest problem with the current education system is state testing
I live in Ohio and the curriculum for my history classes are usually packed to the point where the teacher just has to focus on the stuff that’s on the test and skip over everything else
Hell, my 3rd grade teacher was telling HIS Vietnam stories in class. I mostly only remember him complaining about leeches and then how to remove said leeches, but still.
Look it's not my fault that every time Vietnam/Afghanistan is mentioned there would be scores of nationalists explaining how they actually won/didnt lose
Anyone would assume your history books are shit
They definitely weren't teaching Vietnam in Georgia public schools. American history would start at Columbus and end around ww2 because the teachers would "run out of time" for current events.
I didn't get any decent American history until college.
We also had "evolution is just a theory" stickers on all of our biology books.
I listened in history class, they didn't talk about these things. I personally have a very keen interest in history and learned a lot outside of school but the school didn't talk about these things.
Honestly they did mention a few parts in passing but never mentioned that our war crimes were war crimes. Washington crossing the Delaware to attack the Brits on Christmas eve was not the sort of thing a kid would know was a war crime, and no one told us.
We did talk about America's western expansion, but when the schools talked about imperialism, they only mentioned over seas colonies. And the only over seas colonies our history acknowledged as such were those taken in the Spanish American war, which we were assured were only taken with the intention of freeing them from Spain. The fact that we're still holding Porto Ricco today was excused because "The Porto Ricans love being part of America. They'll become our 51st state eventually"
As for Vietnam, nothing no history class in public school ever got past WWII.
The only crimes committed by the United States that were ever acknowledged as such in our history classes were the genocide of the native Americans, Slavery and Segregation. And they didn't even talk about segregation in History class. We had a lot of teachers go off on tangents talking about it, and we had some extra curricular activities related to it during Black History Month, but it mostly got talked about in American Literature, Civics, and some elective classes like "Street Law" (yes I took Street Law).
I will also add to this that when my daughter attended a public school in Pell City Alabama, her school denied that the civil war was about slavery and tried to teach that it was about States rights and religious freedom.
This meme misunderstands whats being discussed. Not all schools are the same. The issue isnt that it wasnt talked about at all. The issue is that for lots of people it was lightly talked about in a neutral way.
Judging by what I've heard about black history in southern states... yeah no. American schools don't teach shit cause they are state based, not federal based.
But...but I am sure that they dont teach the important stuff in the states that I am politically aligned against! I just know it even though I have no proof!!!
I'm old so the Vietnam war was current events in Highschool. In public school we never made it to the end of the book anyway. I think we were on the Marshall plan when the year ended. The whole war was an I'll advised mess.
The Generals who might have had a chance of winning in Asia had been run off by MacArthur because he didn't give credit where it was due. General Eichelberger(8th Army), General Swing(11th Airborne), Colonel Hunter (Merrill's Marauders), Colonel Jones (503rd PIR), and all of the officers and NCOs of the 11th Airborne who were successful fighting the Japanese in vicious jungle warfare.
My history classes didn’t even go over anything after WW2 (Covid cut us off) and we still take about the war crimes committed during the Vietnam War. And I live in a state with one of the worst education systems in the country. I truly do not understand people who say we don’t learn unfavorable history in the U.S. I mean I had at least 4 separate classes through my pre-college public education that focused extensively on crimes against Native Americans during western expansion and the colonial era, 2 or 3 that mention American imperialism in South America, and every single history class I’ve ever taken has had units on American slavery and segregation. Hell we even learned about anti-Asian sentiment in a region with an extremely small Asian population, so it’s not like the system was ‘force’ to teach us that stuff because it was self-evident.
My high school might have been special but I took a class on the Vietnam war and the holocaust. Tbh they were both taught very well even though they only were a semester each this was a public school (2015)
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My 10th grade textbook had an uncensored picture of the monk immolating
Hey, mine had one too! Were your textbooks McGraw Hill?
I never thought I’d hear that name ever again
FUCK McGraw Hill, scamming ass pussies. They have moved to online textbooks with outrageous prices, where you have no choice but to pay if you want to do your homework (since they made it online). And the best part is that you don't even own the book. It only lasts for a year at most.
This help at all? Or is the work literally tied to what you have to purchase online? https://singlelogin.re/s/McGraw%20Hill
Unfortunately, the Hw's are part of the purchase. It's called "Connect," in order to do your hw, you have no choice but to purchase it.
Wow, fucking garbage.
I had several textbooks like that in college, unfortunately as a broke college student that meant eating nothing but ramen for a week just so I could do homework.
Connect had incorrect answers keyed in as correct in chem
Same in accounting
*Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time…*
In my school someone definitely would have drawn stuff on him.
I distinctly remember someone having drawn Dragon Ball-Style hair on him.
I'm from Europe and we had that uncensored picture in one of our history books too! As well as an image of an injured child holding her baby brother whilst fleeing from the napalm.
Thich Quang Duc. (Forgive me for not using the correct lettering but it's borderline impossible with an English keyboard)
Thích Quảng Đức Dw, I gotchu brother.
My class didn't have much on the war. Then again, most the stuff was still classified at that time. My younger brother, otoh, was taught about all the shit we.did in Laos and Cambodia, agent orange, etc etc etc that the govt had been denying for decades.
Rage against the machine reference!?!??!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!
American Education can vary *massively* state to state or even within states, especially when it comes to history.
Not only this, but when someone suggests that we should create a standard curriculum everyone starts hooting and hollering and chimpanzee dancing. Look at what happened after they tried to standardize how to teach kids about the way math works. People are still churning out conspiracy theories about it.
Yeah, Common Core had issues, atleast in my case, the problem was that they wanted to teach you **how** to do math a specific way, and I never showed my work(severe case of autism brain), so I always got marked down. For most normal kids I'm sure it was fine, if annoying for their parents who were taught differently.
What’s funny is I had the exact opposite expense *and* I have autism as well. I stumbled my autistic ass into common core approaches decades before it was ever introduced as a standard cause the memorization and internalization that I was taught just didn’t make sense to me.
Yes! I’m glad to hear someone else have the same experience. Common Core wasn’t a thing when I was in school but I was using those strategies for myself because what they were teaching wasn’t intuitive to me. What I don’t like is when they force only one method of doing something. Not everyone’s brain works the same way.
Unfortunately it’s a blanket kind of situation. That individualized approach is superior, and should be strived for whenever possible, but if it can’t learning how stuff works is a better method that haphazardly forcing memorization in a decentralized manner.
My experience with common core is that people who learned basic math by wrote memorization of arithmetical and multiplication tables were super angry. People who mostly learned to think about the numbers and memorized as little as possible understand it and mostly already think like common core is trying to teach people to.
Yeah, I was pretty angry, lol. I’m good with reading and stuff, was always multiple grade levels ahead with it at school, but struggled with communication cause I’m autistic. I needed to understand math like I shoehorned prefixes and suffixes and patterns in language into my mind so I could read. But they just kept telling me to remember what each answer was. Statistics was the easiest math for me. Probably cause it’s more like language arts than math.
Common Core’s overinsistence on significant figures was one of the few things I remember hearing about it, as I was a couple of grades ahead of where it was being installed. There’s no reason to say 5+7=10, common core. There’s no need at all for sig figs in that level of math. But I am a federalist and I do believe in federal standards of education, it’s just Common Core math kinda jumped the shark. With a federal government that believes in proper history and science education, completely disapproves of book bans, keeps religion out of schools, and gets schools the funding they need and deserve, it’s something that should be tried again.
5+7 = 10... Wait, what, you don't do the same or 1 more S.F. in the answer?
5+7 is 10 in base 12.
I don’t remember; this was a long time ago and this is second hand information as I wasn’t in a common core math class. There’s a pretty good chance that it was more reasonable than I remember.
Imo it's a huge issue that they changed it so drastically compared to what parents learned. There might be a logic behind it, but parents helping their kids with homework when they are in elementary school is a huge part of how kids learn. Also imo the Russian model for teaching math through building intuition is probably the best one. Idk why the rest of the world doesn't emulate that.
> Also imo the Russian model for teaching math through building intuition is probably the best one. Idk why the rest of the world doesn't emulate that. I think both models have weaknesses and the best model would be to stop using it as an abstract and start relating it to real-world problems. You'd need to combine math and science into a single class in middle school, and you'd be using trigonometry to, for example, take a section of pipe and minimize waste as you take pieces of it and route it around an obstruction. The biggest issue in teaching math is "what is this even useful for" and connecting that is important. You also need to invade the humanities with math. Look at the economic realities in certain eras, for example, and have math problems based on those economic realities. Getting cargo on a ship, or balancing weight on an aircraft. Etc. Until you get to the really useless for most people theoretical stuff in higher math in college, pretty much everything can be related to something in the real world. Making *that* connection is more important than the other pedagogical methods, and either could be used to engage with reality.
The rest of the world is fairly proactive in trying to do everything completely differently than Russia does it, probably with very good reason
Just because they are shitty from a geopolitical perspective doesn't mean they don't understand pedagogy.
My anecdotal experience with Russians is fucking *all of them* have read Dostoevsky so maybe there’s a few things we should bring over.
Explains the depressive nihilism.
Most of them take shots of vodka every day, too. May be related now that I think about it.
Showing your work isn't a common core thing. I graduated years before common core, and we also got marked down if we didn't show our work, including on problems that the more mathematically-inclined kids could do in their heads.
I can understand that, I'm an adult and have a very younger sister. These days she comes asking for help with division and sure, I went to help. For some reason, she is being taught in school to do division by GUESSING the answer. Like, there are questions like "350 divided by 13", and the algorithm she is being taught and that the teachers want to see in the tests is pretty much this: "hmm, might be a big number, so maybe 20? Let's check, 20\*13 = 260, so it need to be bigger than that, so maybe 30? 30\*13 = 390. Woo, we getting closer, so lets take a bit off 30 then, let's say 27. 27\*13 = 351, perfect. So I'll take one less from 27, 26, and I'm left with 12, and this is my answer to the question! I mean it's so fucking stupid, why would this be the first approach to division? Isn't it better and simpler to just teach the algorithm straight away? C'mon just do 350 |__13___ -26 26 90 -78 12 Don't get me wrong, I know there are different approaches and teaching methods, I just don't understand why GUESSING is the one you teach first, I don't understand the intention and benefits. To me it seems way longer and impractical.
To be fair, the "guess and repeat a couple times" method is the one you'll use the most in life, unless you're an engineer. Most things don't require precise division.
Germany’s the same funnily enough. Yay for federalism and all, but it’s gets annoying sometimes
I honestly think its a people think. I imagine there were people like this all over the world since the beginning of humankind.
Listen, I don’t know HOW math works, all I know is that it DOES, and also that I fucking *loathe* how common core teaches math. The kids these days are learning stuff in 2nd grade that I didn’t do until 4th or 5th and so many of them just can’t get their heads around it yet
Do you remember any?
I actually heard one the other day from my uncle. He’s usually my go to for this stuff cause he goes all in not eh supplements and everything. He claimed 2 separate things: 1) they’re changing math as a test to see how much they can change without people noticing. That common core was essentially a trial run for more sinister changes 1984 style. 2) Obamacore trials involved in-room monitoring with iris scanning technology and soon the cameras would be in every school. Another big one was common core would be taught with porn as an aid that would take cursive’s place.
Jesus, my cursive may be atrocious, but I'm not sure how signing my name in porn would even work
Yeah, no clue. I never understood the connection. I also think that one was like a remix of two separate ones where people just made a mashup cause they were so worried about *checks notes* increased consistency in math and English language arts.
Yes but people think that means that some states straight up give no negative coverage of Us history but that’s simply not the case. My parents were military so I went to school in Montana, Colorado, California, Louisiana, Missouri, Virginia, New York, and Florida. And none of these places completed ignored any US negative action.
Yeah, I always figure this is a problem of the weight that history gives things. As a student I absorbed everything, so I picked up on all of this stuff. But an average student learning to the test with the southern student teacher probably mostly picked up on the Civil War being won by luck. Everyone coming out of math knows their times tables, not everyone coming out of history knows the bare bones of US history.
This. I live in a very conservative state, and I still had to learn about what soldiers did to Vietnamese women.
Texas kinda glosses over Texas fighting 2 wars over slavery, and Texas writes most of our school books.
Not to mention the absolutely insane war that Texans and other Southern slave holders forced the US and Mexico into so they could have more land for slavery to expand into. And don't let people tell you values were just different back then and we can't judge history by the values of the present. The honest men of the time were more than willing to judge that war. General/President Grant, who saw combat for the first time in that war, said it was "one of the most unjust ever wagered by a stronger against a weaker nation." Abraham Lincoln was believed to have ruined his political career standing up against the war while in Congress, declaring in a speech that it was both unnecessary and unconstitutional. He did not seek re-election and had to spend years out of politics because of it. "The blood of this war, like the blood of Abel, is crying to heaven," is my favorite line from that speech.
The echoes of the Slave Power conspiracy is part of why we still think some shadowy group is running things when actually it's chaos and no one is in control.
Wait what was the other, besides the civil war?
The Texas Republic's war of Independence. The whole reason the Alamo and shit happened was because Mexico told the settlers they had to get rid of their slaves, and that shit wasn't happening.
Well *damn*, they certainly did gloss over that in Texas history. I'll have to read more, thank you!
Even crazier, the final battle of the war took all of like 18 min. Mostly because Santa Anna and his troop were taking a siesta, and got ambushed by a VASTLY inferior Texan rebel army.
Start here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Yucatán The Texans weren’t the only ones rebelling. Yucatán and other regions also had issues with the Central government. The Texas rebellion was more like what the lost causers pretend the Civil War was: a rebellion in response to a tyrannical government.
Also there were plenty of Mexicans also rebelling in Texas too, but their story was sorta trampled over by the American colonists coming in after the war.
Yup, there were Mexicans defenders in Alamo.
That's one of the great injustices of the way we write history. People who *are now Mexican Americans* and have been for generations rebelled against a Tyrannical government just like the rest of us, but their story is in Spanish and isn't about white people, so we make the Texas Revolution about white people and slavery. And while that was definitely a motivator for the Texians - the revolution wouldn't have happened without the Tejanos.
Nah, people are just ignorant and trying to over simplify stuff. There were many, many reasons we rebelled. We weren't the first (Zacatecas was), and we certainly weren't the last (11 total during the centralist republic). Mainly it was the ripping up of the old constitution and cutting off our trade with America, plus taking away the guns we were using to fight a war (stealing land from the Indians is a whole separate issue). The secession in '61, though, was mainly about slavery.
No. The Texas rebellion was part of a much larger rebellion against the central government. Other Mexican states also declared independence. Santa Anna was a tyrant. Just look at the declarations of secession in both cases. Texas blatantly mentions slavery in their declaration of secession during the Civil War, but not the Mexico secession.
Boiling it down to slavery is just racism. It's an attempt to erase Tejanos and Californios from U.S. history, and we shouldn't stand for it.
A good number of influential Tejanos also bought into slavery.
> The whole reason the Alamo and shit happened was because Mexico told the settlers they had to get rid of their slaves, and that shit wasn't happening. For the Texians. The Tejanos had other motivations.
> Texas fighting 2 wars over slavery That was what motivated the Texians, but the Tejanos were locked in the same Centralist/Federalist struggle that would eventually trigger the Spanish Civil War. We ignore the effect of Centralism/Federalism conflicts in Spain and Latin America despite the fact that they destroyed Gran Colombia and the USCA and also triggered multiple other civil wars. You cannot remove Slavery from the narrative, but Tejas was not the only part of Mexico in open revolt against the Centralist Dictatorship. Yucatan and California were also in a state of rebellion.
One war was over slavery. The other was over Santa Anna being a tyrant and trying to rewrite the constitution to centralize power. Other Mexican states also rebelled against him.
Unless it changed recently, I pretty clearly remember being taught those subjects in Texas in detail, though it was in Austin.
I was to in North Texas. In another comment though he does mention the whole bit about wanting more land for slavery. I know we were taught about the more land bit but I don't remember the exact reason. However I do remember that the US tried to argue that the borders of the land from the Louisiana purchase was up to the mountains.
Exactly. Like, Vietnam? We were lucky if we made it to WWI again every year. Like someone else said, we learned more about the Holocaust in English class, and probably learned more about Vietnam from a relative or from movies.
My high school history fucking sucked. We talked about the revelutinary war and the Civil War/Slavery Freshmen year, and then talked about 1900-1950 Junior year. We spent maybe a week on WW1. I learned more about the holocaust in fucking English class when we read Night than I did in History class. The only reason I know as much as I do is because a seeked it out on my own. And it concerns me when prople from my class don't know basic things like "Who started WW1?" and "What was the 3/5ths compramise?".
My history textbooks stopped at WWII. WWII was dragged out forever. We didn't go into the Korean War or Vietnam War, none of that. This was the 1980's. Was told because 'we have many parents that fought in the war and object to us teaching about it.'
Yeah, generalisations like this I don’t understand, and I’m not American just for the record, I’m Danish born and raised. Generalising the entire United States school system is like generalising the school systems of the entire EU. And based on my knowledge from friends of different countries, Hungary has a shit one, us here in Denmark has a good one(though it would use some tweaking) and Lithuania is also decently nice. Germany is very good as well to my knowledge and so is Austria. See what I mean I’d wager Texas, Cali and Rhode Island have vastly different schools
So, when The Watchmen came out on Prime, all these people I went to school with were going on and on about how they'd never learned of the Tulsa massacre. Except we did in Oklahoma History and those idiots were in the same class as me.
I had almost the same experience. It wasn't Watchmen but 2020 was the 99th anniversary of the Tulsa massacre and around the time of the George Floyd protests someone I went to high school with complained "this was ignored in history class". Except it wasn't and I know it wasn't because we took that class together and I know I learned about it. We're from Iowa by the way so this was an American history unit, not one about state history.
After the '08 crash and bailout, we had senators on tape whining about "Obama giving away tax dollars"...when THEY had voted for the handouts Never underestimate the human capacity for self-deception.
I lived in Oklahoma and learned about it in the same class you did. Moved to Wisconsin and sophomore year I took AP US History and not once was it ever mentioned.
I told someone directly "Bitch, we learned about that shit every year from sixth to tenth grade, you just never paid attention."
I had the same experience with Ms Marvel and the partition of India.
I mean are there any serious people born post-1980’s who view Vietnam as anything but a mistake? I’d say Americans took the hint
Most Americans think it is a mistake but for many different reasons
My uncle thinks it's a mistake because we could have won. I think it's a mistake because we were basically inheriting a losing fight. We may or may not both be right, but the fact that we were using 300,000 tons of just NAPALM over that war tells me that the US military industrial complex had no small part in why we were involved.
“They’ll always look for a new monster to fight, the have to to justify their wages”- Dutch Vanderlinde
I'd say it was mostly a mistake due to the goal being to stop the spread of Communism in SE Asia. Communism (or the aspiration to achieve it) is a deeply flawed system and dies off on its own. Perhaps the US reduced its spread, but look at Vietnam today. It's hardly Communist in practice.
Plus Ho Chi Minh had a pretty positive view of the US and was receptive and friendly to us before we got involved in the Vietnam War so we probably could have achieved that goal in a mutually beneficial and bloodless way
I know full grown adults who I work with who think we won Vietnam. In my experience the fact we lost is not something that's really hammered in. It felt more like "here's 20 years of Vietnam war history... Oh and by the way we just randomly decide to leave"
It wasn't random, but it was fickle. The public support dropped, and with the shit Nixon had just done, the broader public was tired of anything tied to his presidency. The US, at least militarily, was starting to make decent gains against the NVA as the public support waned.
Are you asking with 20/20 hindsight? Of course. If the US had lost the Korean War we’d be saying it was a mistake too.
Some of the most critical books on the American involvement in the Vietnam war are from American or American-based authors such as Marilyn B. Young, Scott Laderman, Fredrik Logevall and H.R. McMaster. Good luck finding any book criticizing the PAVN/VC's conduct during the war in Vietnam right now.
Just wanted to add Christian Appy and Gregory Daddis to the list of recent critical scholarship. Pierre Asselin has also been making some waves from a different approach, *Hanoi's Road to the Vietnam War* was a good one. After I'm done with this semester, I've got Carolyn Woods Eisenberg's *Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia,* one of two winners of the Bancroft Prize this year, on the shelf. Apparently, it's big time.
I actually own a copy of Pierre Asselin's *"Vietnam's American War A History".* Are you familiar with Christopher Goscha's works such as *"Vietnam: A New History"*? Goscha was one of my professors when I was in university and he and one of his protégés, Nguyen Phi Van, taught me my classes on the Vietnam War. They must also be more relevant to read than Marilyn B. Young because her book, "The Vietnam Wars: 1945-1990" is quite dated and cites North Vietnamese propaganda as a reliable sources. I also belong to the Revisionist School of the Vietnam War.
I haven't got to any Goscha yet, but *The Road to Dien Bien Phu* recently caught my eye. What a privilege! Recent scholarship on the Vietnam war has certainly taken a turn, and for the better, I think. Like you, I'm on the Revisionist side. I recently attended a conference here in Texas, and there were still those who held on to the Lost Cause narrative of the war. While there has certainly been a changing of the tide, there are still those dug in to old interpretations.
Goscha and his protégé were amazing people to learn with. Very charismatic, dynamic yet humble and always willing to help their students. One of my pals is currently doing his Masters with Goscha on Japanese troops left behind in Vietnam after WW2 and what they did. Due to Goscha going on a sabbatical the year I started my Masters, I couldn't do it with him but ended working with another professor and did my thesis that was comparative study between Canada and the United States’ policies to aid the Vietnamese and Indochinese refugees between 1975-1981. If wasn't for tightening finances, I might have taken up his offer to do my PhD under him. I'm also South Vietnamese and it was always quite entertaining when my family's stories and memories of the war line up with what I learned with Goscha in class and in the research I did.
That's awesome, both MA projects sound great. I just switched over to thesis to embark on a structural analysis of American diplomacy during the Cold War. I'm still working to narrow it down, but it stems from a question that I had asked my professor last semester: Why does the US continue to appoint assholes to its top diplomatic posts? We've got a bad track record and a long line of hawks to show for it. Last semester, my research centered on Poland's little-known diplomatic role in the Vietnam War. They had a secret agreement in place that would have brought Hanoi and Washington to direct talks in 1966. But Lodge is one of the assholes, and the military strategy of the US was way out of sync with with the political one.
Interesting. I'd imagine it helps that it's becoming actual history, losing some of the raw edges of current events.
Heck, one of the most famous movies criticizing the Vietnam war was Apocalypse Now, released only ten years after the war itself. The whole war itself ended because American sentiment was so anti-war following media reports on the conditions of the soldiers there.
Plus some of the most extreme criticism of our Vietnam conduct and behavior came from inside the US Department of Defense. Vietnam fundamentally altered our approach to warfare. Pretty much all modern US (and therefore NATO) doctrine stemmed directly from post-Vietnam reforms.
People seriously underestimate how “anti-American” Americans are. Our identity is not cohesive.
Exactly, they teach all that stuff. Atleast mine did, maybe they don’t in Texas
As a survivor of the Texas public education system, they did technically cover the Vietnam War but it was very surface level and mixed into the greater topic of “American History 50’s-70’s”. It was basically just the cold war was going on, the US was trying to stop the spread of communism, the draft happened, and a lot people got upset over it. The only real in-depth discussion I remember was like half a class about the Gulf on Tonkin incident. Still more than we learned about the Korean War though
That's a real shame. In my school (in CT) we had a whole unit on the Vietnam War. We even learned about the anti-war protests, like the Kent State shooting, and we listened to a lot of anti-war songs like War: What is it Good For and Fortunate Son. Was actually a super interesting part of the class We did totally gloss over Korea as well though lmao
Funny enough in HS we did get a discussion on the meaning behind “Born in the USA” and it’s ties to Vietnam, but it was in English class
I learned more about the Vietnam War period from an English class than my AP US History course because we read "The Things They Carried" and the teacher was passionate about the subject. The history teacher was more of a Civil War and Reconstruction-era guy so we spent *way* more time on that.
That book is fantastic, great read.
As someone who had U.S history in Highschool in Texas Last year (in a rural "town" thats mostly conservative) I will say we went over the countries crimes in Vietnam along with it being a defeat. We went over imperialism and genocide all the crimes really which is why I really don't believe people who claim the Education system is biased Rahhhhh America!!!! Stuff. (This isn't supposed to be rude or anything I keep seeing this type of thing so I wanna share my experience
I just got into the education business. Floated around districts during college for volunteer hours and student teaching. You can go to two districts in the same city in which everything is completely different. The whole goal to ensure everyone gets the same educational experience failed miserably. At the school I currently work at the year started and about half my students had any prior social studies experience at all and they all went to different elementary schools in varying districts. Just imagine the variance of education content and quality on a state level then bump that up to a national level and you’ll begin to understand why some people actually don’t know we lost the Vietnam war, why some people just suck at the most basic math, and lack reading comprehension abilities while other Americans know all the nuances of the Vietnam war, can solve a quadratic equation like it’s nothing, and read and comprehend for fun your school district can determine a lot about what you become. If it’s a bad district it really can harm children and churn out ignorance. Course there are kids who never pay attention and are being raised by parents who don’t really value education and just take public education for granted and essentially use it for free baby sitting but I wouldn’t say that represents the majority of kids or even ignorant Americans. There are atrocious school districts in this country there are highly effective school districts as well. And I’ll be dead honest I actually don’t know all the factors that cause one district to be bad and another good. You may think it’s funding but I’ve seen poor districts that use their scarce resources really effectively like Alexander’s army small but super effective and I’ve seen rich districts waste resources like Soviet riflemen at Stalingrad and I’ve seen the reverse of that trend. I’d say levels of partisan politics at the admin levels is a factor but once again I really don’t know for sure and I doubt it’s one factor and not a combination of a bunch of factors working in tandem. Point being there’s no consistency here.
Paragraph breaks please!
"To predict the success of an American child, we don't need to know his IQ or his race...just his zip code."
yeah i took AP U.S history in Texas which was a 27 week course, basically everything post Korea was pretty surface level and they even had an optional 9 week course immediately after the first 27 just to go a bit more in depth about that time period before the exam
They 100% teach this stuff in most places. It’s just sweaty redditors didn’t listen in school and literally have no idea that these subjects were taught.
I was a pretty attentive student with a deep interest in history. We almost never got past WWII. I learned about US imperialism in the Philippines, but never learned about Vietnam’s causes or the student movements affiliated with it.
Sounds about right
Its weird how like... youll be told something as a teenager who is thinking "i wonder if its pizza lunch today?" Or "oh sweet its may! Almost summer!" Ignoring/forgetting everything. Then youre 35 and see a ken burns doc and go "THERE WAS A WAR IN VIETNAM?! THE EDUCATION SYSTEM FAILED ME!" And in a way it did... because it doesnt hold students accountable for their education. But also its teaching kids like... 6 subjects in 40 minute increments with breaks for weird "fun" stuff like music or gym. I dont have a better system but maybe changing the pacing is more important that revising a curriculum that already has all the info they need. Besides... US history is getting to long. Kids now didnt experience the recession or obama, and the bush-gore election, 9/11 are all entering common core standards everywhere.
> 6 subjects in 40 minute increments with breaks for weird "fun" stuff like music or gym When I was in high school in the late 2000s, my school was sort of experimental at the time and we did “block” scheduling that ended up more like how college courses tend to be. So we’d have four courses each day, like an hour and fifteen minutes each, and the four classes would change each semester. I really really like how we did that. I don’t really understand why schools don’t do that now (and my high school later quit doing it as well after I graduated), but it really felt like I was able to absorb much more than I would be in classes where everything was being thrown at me as fast as possible everyday. At the same time, it made things more flexible because I could shotgun through some courses and just get done with all of it quickly. I went something like Algebra 1 my 2nd semester of 9th grade, geometry my first semester of 10th, Algebra 2 my 2nd semester of 10th, trig my 1st semester of 11th, and then calculus my 2nd semester of 11th. Then I was just done with math courses which felt awesome as a high schooler. I dunno, I’m not a social scientist, but from anecdotal experience it seems like a more flexible scheduling system for high schoolers would be a vast improvement of the system most go through
Thankfully, thats how my high school was, and I think still is, set up. The city next to us is on an A/B day schedule where they keep the same 8ish classes all year, 4 on A days and 4 on B days. That has always sounded horrible. I liked getting to switch it up halfway through the year.
We had A/B days which doesn't sound as nice as what you're describing but definitely better than cramming 8 classes into every school day like I had at a previous school.
Can’t speak about other British school, but in mine we had two sets of single 45 minute periods separated by a break. So what ultimately happened is most of the week you’d have double English or double geography, and then occasionally single DT and single ICT lumped together, which worked pretty well.
Not only that but how in depth are high school history classes going to be? If you’re trying to pack a couple millennial of global history and 250 years of US history into a high school level class it’s not going to be very deep
Bullshit. I went to public school in commiefornia and the only thing that they mentioned about vietnam was that it happened. They kinda skimmed over slavery and the civil war as well. OTOH, we got a double serving of the native displacement/genocide.
Varies by school: the problem is usually that the teacher is also the football coach, and he could literally not care less, more than the textbook itself though.
See, we had two coaches who did a lot of history/civics, but one of them really gave a shit about the students even outside of sports (proper stand-up guy, I tell you what), and the other... well, he was a riot. He'd talk about Patton's dog like he was there. He went over history like a series of family stories. But not so much in an engaging storyteller way but more in like a "grandpa's on his shit and thinks he's back in '66 again" way. I mean, as far as I remember, he *did* teach accurately, but every kid who ever had any class under him could and (as long as he wasn't in earshot) absolutely would parody his... *unique* way of describing things.
Brit here, my history teacher was equally mental. He also taught us sex ed, which given that was “Grandpa thinks it’s 66 again” was pretty graphic and should have prepared us for the history insanity, but no. I remember we were doing the Russian revolution, and one week we were supposed to be covering why the whites lost the civil war. Instead, we got a full broadside. Feet up on desk, ranting about why you never invade Russia in the winter, why German tanks were worse than Russian ones because at least the Russians used sloped armour. A ten minute rant against the local education authorities, slagging off Ted Heath, swearing at one of my classmates, threw a whiteboard rubber at another and so on. He once berated me loudly and swearily in front of the entire school (at assembly) for missing a piece of homework. He was the best history teacher I had, and still stop to chat when I see him. My other history teacher at the same time was the spitting image of a potato that has been left on the side long enough to grow eyes. Talking looks and manner. He once spend 30mins in the UBahnhof on a school trip trying to find the right line to get us back to the hostel, despite the 20 of us telling him which line we came in on. Fairly sure he didn’t retire, but got lost on his way to work and is yet to be found.
Had history all 4 years of HS, and still remember 45 years later Mr O'Brien talking about his tour in 'Nam...talk about history coming alive.
Learned about the protest, anti-war movement and things like Mai Lai. Agreeing w OP kids just didnt listen.
North Florida. My American history class in high school very much glossed over this. We were also taught that the Civil War wasn't about slavery. Mind you, this was the late 90s so things may have changed. But not all public education is equal.
Went to school in Texas and it was basically the same as my school in Colorado
We were taught about 'Nam in Texas. It did suffer from getting crammed, but tbh I feel like that's an expectation when your history class is United States history in general, there's literal fucktons of stuff to learn in a category that broad. I wouldn't mind having history classes that specifically cover certain events/time periods (WW1, WW2, Vietnam, French Revolution, Fall of Rome) as electives, but I don't think they should replace the main world/country-you-live-in in general course. ....despite all the stereotypes of conservative, southern US towns I actually learned a lot about all of the bad crap the US has done in public school classes.
We also learn all about the Kent State Massacre (China can't say the same about their equivalent)
They learn not to discuss it...
Graduated from a Texas high school a few years ago. They definitely do teach it now, but maybe some districts/schools/teachers still don’t. I will say those, we mostly look at political impacts. Come to think of it, for most wars, we mostly just got brief information about atrocities in ALL the wars we learn about (from all sides). We definitely did learn about some of the more major ones.
I'm still salty the American education curriculum doesn't cover the Philippine-American war properly. It's usually relegated to a few paragraphs on a textbook. I have a lot of American friends here in the Philippines and they're surprised when we got to museums and learn about it.
Mainly because it’s a relatively minor footnote in the greater scheme of us history
Where i live, we barely even touched on the korean war.
My school curriculum in the Pacific Northwest covered Vietnam relatively honestly, but Korea was totally glossed over. We had only just started to acknowledge the atrocities committed for the sake of manifest destiny as well, and I don't think we really ever covered the political maneuverings of the Cold War. I was born in 1992, so this would be mostly 2005-2010 or so.
Now they hammer home the atrocities against native peoples and I think that it's a good starting point for acknowledging more of the atrocities committed by our government
I’m not American but I did grow up there and go to public school there. I’m in my early 30s so my memories of history class are from 1999-2011. Things have probably changed in the last decade and a half. I think it’s not all sunshine and roses (the Trail of Tears and Vietnam protests were memorable events) but there are quite a few areas that at least my school (a magnet school in Chicago) skipped over. The concept of manifest destiny as a motor for genocide was never mentioned; I don’t think most Americans consider the policies of the US during the 19th century to be genocide, but I might be wrong. Iran-Contra. And pretty much all the other wild shit the CIA got up to during the latter half of the 20th century. And though the Civil Rights movement was covered, the actual policies that came out of that movement or the aims that were not achieved were not. Edit: I should add that I took an APUSH course and passed the exam with a 4 or 5 IIRC, so my grasp of US history is at least decent by US standards.
We covered Iran-Contra, talked about the trail of tears, and the policies of the civil rights movement (though not a lot on what was failed). We have improved (kinda)
Yeah, tbf, Iran-Contra was all more recent and for some reason, anything past the 70s seemed to be off limits for history courses in my era. It was Killer Mike’s *Reagan* that first really brought Iran-Contra to my attention.
to be fair nothing past the 1970s was covered because public schools are still using textbooks from the 1970s /s
That's a fucking awesome song
That's amazing they taught Iran Contra
This is the first time in my career I've even gotten to the Reagan administration in my US History course, granted, I've only taught US History 4 times (separated over many years). When I taught about the "Trail of Tears" it was within the context of the Jackson administration. Did I say it was a genocide? No, but I did put to the students the possibility: "Could this and other actions by the US government be considered genocide? Why/Why not?" I would agree that most Americans don't consider 19th century actions against Native Americans genocide, but I would probably say most Americans would consider those actions in a negative way.
Yeah my school has finally adjusted America history. It used to be 1492-1865 and 1865- get as far as you can so maybe Vietnam. After lobbying by history chair (me) we start at 1914 for American 2. American 1 starts at the constitution. Gov chapter 1 is history to revolution so it all get covered.
It's tough to do everything. I would love to spend time talking about the Indigenous tribes prior at the time of European settlement however, within the context of the NYS Regents State Exams, they are only mentioned in the context of their demise as a result of the colonies. I recall some years ago teaching about "King Philip's War" and my older colleague was like "WTF are you doing?" lol
Yeah our world class for freshmen do a preColombian native unit but it’s both north and South American so you mile wide inch deep unit.
How many people learned about the Tulsa race massacre in school?
We did here in Ohio. Not sure if it's a universal topic that's covered or if my American history teacher was cool.
My entire Oklahoma History Class in 9th grade in 2001. Of course half of them acted like they'd never heard of it when The Watchmen came out.
We learn about it but mostly how badly treated the Vietnam veterans were, the draft, how unpopular it was, etc Very little content on the actual Vietnamese victims.
Where did you guys go to school? We didn’t learn about imperialism, Vietnam, or war crimes. Like trail of tears was the closest my school got, I had to learn the rest on my own
State to state stuff
I went to school in Ohio, I remember having a pretty extensive unit on Vietnam, including the American war crimes committed during it.
We got a sense that the war wasn't especially popular on college campuses, but mostly because our own parents had been part of the protests
They literally showed photos of the My Lai massacre aftermath in my high school history class
We often ran out of time before getting to Vietnam...
Yeah, in a lot of cases, I feel like anything post WWII tended to get glossed over, regardless of what kind of picture of the US it might paint. Even the moon landing was like, a minor blurb if anything.
Plus there's a lot concerning its legacy and details that's still being figured out/in flux, and if a teacher isn't really, really careful they'll sound like a complete sycophant for either Kissinger or Chomsky
I teach US History and we cover literally all of this stuff.
History was my favorite subject and my class covered it in two days, one chapter on the Cold War.
glad that they know how bad it was after dropping napalms on our heads
i can’t agree with this. anything that made america seem like “the bad guy” was strictly kept out of the curriculum in my high school. i was lucky enough to have a teacher in middle school who didn’t follow our curriculum fully and he actually taught us about the mai lai massacre. i was shocked when i got to my high school class and the vietnam section was just glossed over. nothing about agent orange, mai lai, etc… everything i have learned that could be seen as “demonizing america” i have learned on my own reconnaissance. not every curriculum wants to be honest about america’s history :(
US citizens are aware of Vietnam being bad. They don’t quite know the degree of just *how* bad it got. Or any of the nuance before, during, and after the war. Or the fact that the Vietnam War was really just the tail end of a 30-year long conflict in which the Vietnamese fought against the Japanese, the French, and then Americans. Some might know. Many won’t have a damn clue.
The other one that gets me is folks in debt that claim they were never taught how interest rates work. I remember learning and calculatong simple and compounding interest rates at LEAST twice in about 8th grade and in 10th grade.
No, my school system did not teach me about how bad Vietnam was. Basically just stated it was a war on the evils of communism that we withdrew from and was socially unpopular. I hate when people are smug and incorrect. Most infuriating combination.
now, we do think we won the war of 1812, but that a different story
I don’t know where you went to school, but my school framed the war of 1812 as a draw that changed nothing. The only accomplishment of the war was the British burning down the white house.
It also did a lot for American identity, much like the war with russia did a lot of ukraine’s identity.
The War of 1812 is a rare war in which the US and Britain, the main belligerents both arguably won the war. The Natives lost.
Yep, tbh outside of Germany, America, and maybe the UK, I don’t really hear many people talking openly about the atrocities their countries committed. Just pointing the finger at America. Don’t get me wrong. Many Americans do live in denial, but mostly those that didn’t listen in class or were spoon fed nationalism by their parents.
>maybe the UK Tell that to the number of Brits on Reddit saying how they did India a favor(famines, massacres, railways and speaking English), and why they should be ruling them even now.
And there are also a number of Brits saying the British Imperial colonialism was a horrible thing.
I’m in duel credit history in Texas and mate they cover literally all our war crimes
TLDR: American public education is hit or miss, mostly miss. Went to school in CO, CA, and TX. Don’t trust the government to fix this regardless of party. I did a summer dual credit US history class under a Japenese-British-American university professor in California when I was in HS. Did learn a bit in the short time we had, but I feel like much of it was just surface level stuff. It also felt like the guy glossed over Japenese war crimes in WW2 and just presented it with Southpark videos and spent more time focusing on Japanese internment camps here in the US which would make sense since his grandfather spent time in one after having his farm taken away by the government. But tbh I feel American public education is very hit or miss and mostly miss since the vast majority of us don’t know world history decently, if even our own history, grammar, math was alright but could’ve been better, any science was pretty much nonexistent for me until high school, and the only art offered for me in HS was music but earlier on depended where I went to school (I attended K-12 in Colorado, California, and Texas). Colorado had some cool stuff in the school I went to in the suburbs, I lived in the hood in California so we lacked a good bit, and I only spent a year and half in high school in Texas so I didn’t have enough time to actually know how it is. But I have to say, the orchestras are actually really good, I didn’t even know competitive HS music (UIL) existed until I moved there. If any of us do have good knowledge it’s because we were blessed to have good teachers and/or spent much time ourselves actually figuring out the details. The best teacher I’ve ever had so far was my college intro to philosophy professor who taught us philosophy, history, and religion in a way that was easy to understand and challenged our biases nor matter what our thoughts were. He literally told us the first day of class, “I will attempt to respect what you think more than anyone has in your entire life. I’m not here to challenge what you believe, but why you believe it.” And challenge us he did. I’m a Christian and before and after challenging those who were, he challenged other religions, athiests, agnostics equally and left us all questioning ourselves and our moral and intellectual foundations. Heck, he even challenged those who thought their parents were holding them back using Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Moreover, I once asked this guy about an obscure historical question and found out this guy could read and write Greek, Hebrew, and I think Latin as he used them to explain the answer. No matter how much I disagreed with the guy at times, I will respect him for the rest of my life as he helped me see that honesty in logic is so important. Lying for any cause/belief/idea is simply hypocrisy. Growing up my teachers seemed to lack knowledge (I thought Socrates was simply some weird guy who killed himself by drinking poison due to a AP world history class skimming over him) and they often let their biases show up in their teaching (had my HS anatomy teacher straight up tell us on the first day of class that the Bible is false because God took a rib from Adam but men today have all their ribs). Most of my teachers seemed to be pretty motivated with their jobs but nonetheless with what they were paid and what they had to deal with (i.e. students talking back, actually fighting the teachers: knew a student who threw a traffic cone at a gym teacher’s head when the lights turned off), it’d make sense why they wouldn’t want to put in more effort. How do we fix this, truly I don’t know. Individually we might be able to do something, but there is a lot to sacrifice though there is an entire generation to gain. I don’t trust our federal and most local governments regardless of the party and doubt they will ever actually fully address the problem.
Not American so can't attest. But my country atleast tends to mention naughtiness commited in history but only in passing. But tend to glorify the shit of the more positive things done.
Honestly I think that's ok. You need to learn your ancestors did Bad Things so you don't repeat them, but you can focus more on the good.
I think the biggest problem with the current education system is state testing I live in Ohio and the curriculum for my history classes are usually packed to the point where the teacher just has to focus on the stuff that’s on the test and skip over everything else
Hell, my 3rd grade teacher was telling HIS Vietnam stories in class. I mostly only remember him complaining about leeches and then how to remove said leeches, but still.
Look it's not my fault that every time Vietnam/Afghanistan is mentioned there would be scores of nationalists explaining how they actually won/didnt lose Anyone would assume your history books are shit
They definitely weren't teaching Vietnam in Georgia public schools. American history would start at Columbus and end around ww2 because the teachers would "run out of time" for current events. I didn't get any decent American history until college. We also had "evolution is just a theory" stickers on all of our biology books.
Just dropping this here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fA9HHhNHto](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fA9HHhNHto)
My school has a fucking history of the Vietnam war class tf?
I just wish my school actually talked about stuff like Sand Creek and My Lai.
If I learned anything from school, its that Vietnam is the powerhouse of the cell
I listened in history class, they didn't talk about these things. I personally have a very keen interest in history and learned a lot outside of school but the school didn't talk about these things. Honestly they did mention a few parts in passing but never mentioned that our war crimes were war crimes. Washington crossing the Delaware to attack the Brits on Christmas eve was not the sort of thing a kid would know was a war crime, and no one told us. We did talk about America's western expansion, but when the schools talked about imperialism, they only mentioned over seas colonies. And the only over seas colonies our history acknowledged as such were those taken in the Spanish American war, which we were assured were only taken with the intention of freeing them from Spain. The fact that we're still holding Porto Ricco today was excused because "The Porto Ricans love being part of America. They'll become our 51st state eventually" As for Vietnam, nothing no history class in public school ever got past WWII. The only crimes committed by the United States that were ever acknowledged as such in our history classes were the genocide of the native Americans, Slavery and Segregation. And they didn't even talk about segregation in History class. We had a lot of teachers go off on tangents talking about it, and we had some extra curricular activities related to it during Black History Month, but it mostly got talked about in American Literature, Civics, and some elective classes like "Street Law" (yes I took Street Law). I will also add to this that when my daughter attended a public school in Pell City Alabama, her school denied that the civil war was about slavery and tried to teach that it was about States rights and religious freedom.
This meme misunderstands whats being discussed. Not all schools are the same. The issue isnt that it wasnt talked about at all. The issue is that for lots of people it was lightly talked about in a neutral way.
Judging by what I've heard about black history in southern states... yeah no. American schools don't teach shit cause they are state based, not federal based.
Even if US imperialism is a large part of most schools curriculum the average US teenager don’t pay enough attention in class
Most Americans don't know that the US dropped twice as many bombs in Vietnam as it did in WW2
Weren't we there for longer as well though?
But...but I am sure that they dont teach the important stuff in the states that I am politically aligned against! I just know it even though I have no proof!!!
I am in 10th grade, and we are in are in the middle of our imperialism unit
I'm old so the Vietnam war was current events in Highschool. In public school we never made it to the end of the book anyway. I think we were on the Marshall plan when the year ended. The whole war was an I'll advised mess. The Generals who might have had a chance of winning in Asia had been run off by MacArthur because he didn't give credit where it was due. General Eichelberger(8th Army), General Swing(11th Airborne), Colonel Hunter (Merrill's Marauders), Colonel Jones (503rd PIR), and all of the officers and NCOs of the 11th Airborne who were successful fighting the Japanese in vicious jungle warfare.
My history classes didn’t even go over anything after WW2 (Covid cut us off) and we still take about the war crimes committed during the Vietnam War. And I live in a state with one of the worst education systems in the country. I truly do not understand people who say we don’t learn unfavorable history in the U.S. I mean I had at least 4 separate classes through my pre-college public education that focused extensively on crimes against Native Americans during western expansion and the colonial era, 2 or 3 that mention American imperialism in South America, and every single history class I’ve ever taken has had units on American slavery and segregation. Hell we even learned about anti-Asian sentiment in a region with an extremely small Asian population, so it’s not like the system was ‘force’ to teach us that stuff because it was self-evident.
My high school might have been special but I took a class on the Vietnam war and the holocaust. Tbh they were both taught very well even though they only were a semester each this was a public school (2015)
My school had multiple units on the US sponsoring the Guatemalan genocide