Its fun to reminisce about all the blatant lies we were fed in grade school.
Who remembers that pretty cartoon in their textbooks of the pilgrims and their new friends the Native Americans enjoying a Thanksgiving feast together?
We spent only spent a week learning about the labor movement in US history, and it was basically “Kids were working in factories and then they passed a law to stop that.”
It’s like they didn’t want to give us ideas.
I feel like everything between the emancipation of the slaves and the 60s Civil Rights Movement was skimmed over.
It’s actually even more fucked up than fabricating it entirely. Early on they were more or less getting along, but under false pretenses. The settlers claimed they had no interest in expanding into native lands and they were just there temporarily to facilitate trade with England.
I remember when we were taught in school that karl marx was russian and when were told what communism is, we were given the definition for Authoritarianism, not any economic changes
Huh? Which part or parts are you saying is false? With what little records we have of the time, it’s still relatively true.
Native Americans weren’t all one nation. Settlers were at peace and at war with numerous different tribes just like many city state type nations.
Here I thought you were going to say there was no classic Thanksgiving meal, which is sorta true. What they ate was very different but still relatively based in truth to our knowledge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanksgiving_dinner#Plymouth_Colony_and_Thanksgiving_dinner
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanksgiving_(United_States)#Early_thanksgiving_observances
It’s extremely disingenuous and intentionally misleading that our introduction of the Native Americans to young children is portrayed as peaceful and kind when the headline of European immigrant relations with Native Americans is genocide. It would be better to say nothing about them than to leave the opposite impression of what actually happened until they’re older.
It would be akin to young German Children being taught about Adolf Hitler: Staunch Animal Rights activist until they’re older. Sure, I guess he was, but it would be obvious what the goal of leading with that factoid is.
The goal of early social study books highlighting that is to instill “America Yay” ideas in kids heads, a vestige of the whole manifest destiny we did nothing wrong narrative. We are a nation built on foundations of genocide and slavery. That is overwhelming reality. But many, particularly conservative Americans, would prefer that be expunged from our national identity so they can feel better about our history, which is the basis of their war on CRT.
I don’t think that’s true at all nor what they teach in numerous areas. Ymmv depending on your school district and how racist your rural school or suburbian city is though.
Regardless, your point of contention was literally with the First Thanksgiving mythos. It’s like saying the Christmas Day Soccer match in WW1 or whatever isn’t true because there was a war between every nation happening. Absolutely not. It’s one point of goodness which should absolutely be taught. Because humans do vastly more good than bad.
Humanity trudges on with or without the doomers every generation since even before Jesus the Apocalypticist.
My history teacher told me, 1) the best thing that can happen to a country is to be invaded by the US because the US will rebuild them. He could only mention Japan though. 2) real estate only goes up. 3) complained about poor “wellfare queens”, but no mention of corporate welfare queens, 4) said that, with the exception of Teacher Unions, the Unions were obsolete.
There were probably more, but those always stuck out to me even back when he told them. This was circa 2003. On the flip side, I only heard one mention of climate change out of a science teacher and only when questioned directly about it.
This is probably because in school you need all these intricate, factually accurate details.
If you can pick and choose which things you actually find interesting it becomes way easier
I think that’s part of it. The other part is that primary school teachers have to teach to the curriculum and not what they want. So if they want to teach about how whites got preferential treatment but the county school board says “No CrItIcAl RaCe ThEoRy!1”, they can’t teach it.
My college history professors were far more engaging. Especially my military history professor.
Nah it’s because schools are environments designed to make learning unappealing.
When I research my own things I can follow my interests and passions and that includes intricate details; School was purely 1 way, sit down, shut up, memorise this. I had zero input into my own learning and life.
Also, the school subject is kinda supposed to give you general knowledge of most of the general history, and they have X years to do it. Back in school we even had 2 different history subjects in our schedules, where one focused on the history of the world and one was for national history of the country.
While researching history on your own, you are the one who decides how shallow or deep you want to look into something, so it naturally just aligns with stuff that you find interesting.
School: Cover several centuries of human activity in a brief class. There is no time for context or detail. Good luck trying to get more than a few key names and dates.
Self-directed: Dive deep into a specific topic of interest. Get to know the main people involved: their personalities, backgrounds, motivations. Spend all the time you like exploring how their actions still resonate today.
Our history textbooks were actually good in this regard. In addition to a broad look at world history, they had focus chapters on things like the history of cricket and the Vietnam war.
Now if only they could stop the Indian history section from being the history of powerful men in and around Delhi …
It really depends on the teacher tbh. I’ve been pretty lucky, some of my best teachers ever have been in history.
Yeah, there is, not by chance, a “story” in “history”. It needs to be told, by somebody who knows how to do that. Learning facts from old books, the studying, is one part, weaving them into a whole, the telling, the other.
That’s the biggest gripe I have with how history was taught. A lot was focused on the who what when but the why, and how it all build up to the world today in a big picture sense was often lacking.
Most everything is.
I agree. I’ve found that a lot of the subjects I hated in school, I ended up finding an interest in later in life on my own. I now think it had a lot more to do with the method of teaching than the material itself.
Was about to post this.
Bonsai people, expert in a couple years, vs regular people where it takes a decade.
But those bonsai people aren’t really experts.
I actually loved history at school. My favourite time was when we did a big study on the Weimar Republic, and interwar Germany in general, up until the rise of Hitler.
We never did any work in history class, my teacher just sat and chatted with us about the topics and I learned more from that class than any other.
I had a primary school teacher like that. He was in love with French culture and his enthusiasm for the topic was so infectious that I learned more in a single day with him, than I did in any of the years of textbook French lessons I took in high school.
I hated it but my teacher just had us read a book quietly and then tested us on it. Almost no interaction at all other than occasionally making us take turns reading it out loud which also just kinda sucks
Ok. Henry Ford may have largely inspired hitler to kill the jews and hitler even mentions Ford in Mein Kampf.
Must teachers suck at teaching history. History is about stories; the dates are just there to remind us of what order they all came in.
History in school was all about rote-memorization of names/dates/etc. With wikipedia, memorizing dates is less important.
Everybody knows the names Newton and Einstein. Maybe Hubble because of the telescope. But scratching a little deeper to find names such as Maxwell, Planck and Dirac, and boy let me tell ya I got hooked well and proper on physics and its’ history.
Then you find the pivotal achievements of women like Henrietta Leavitt, Emmy Noether and Vera Rubin. I cannot even begin to imagine the harassment, both institutional and informal, that these brilliant minds had to contend with on a daily basis back then.
About Henrietta Leavitt at Harvard’s astronomy department, she hired a team exclusively of deaf women, so they could remain focused on their task of analyzing photographic glass plates in search of variable stars, oblivious to the heckles and taunts from the male research faculty.
This was Harvard, mind you. Supposed to be a place where proper conduct and appearances matter, where high society young men become refined adult gentlemen. The only way to get the job done was to hire only hearing-impaired women.
So you scratch on one subject, like physics, you find the pioneers in the history of equal rights and the mindless environment they lived in, what they had to struggle with on a daily basis.
Another good example is baseball.
If you start scratching on its’ history, pretty quickly you will land on Jackie Robinson, players’ rights (or lack thereof), and abhorrent figures like Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Baseball could not and would not become desegregated until after this shit-mountain was literally dead and buried in the mid-1940s.The " its’ " completely derailed my train of thought
While I have to say that A-Level history was deathly boring in some places, some parts of it really interested me, and it gave me the proper skills to be able to do my own research and properly scrutinise historical sources
Why the fuck does Dionysus predate the entire pantheon?
Wine?
And there’s me, I found both really interesting at school and throughly enjoyed it way more than geography, which was the case with me at school, but studying at home has been far more interesting in comparison o.o
I am not someone meant for lectures. i can’t sit still for an hour and just listen to someone rant at me without any engagement.
I am sure that the history of human civilization taught in the school is only the tip of the iceberg.
