What people know.......

[I have WHAT in my yard?]

Two things I just learned that floored me.

A significant number of college freshman do not know who the gestapo was.

A significant number of college incoming freshman are not truly clear about what happened on 9/11 Turns out that they were 8 when it happened and many schools did not teach anything about it for several years considering too traumatic. Younger kids do know.

 

[Imp]

I think that is somewhat true of all times.
I graduated HS in 1979 from a well funded small school district in a small town in Alaska. In my history classes, I was taught WW2 about 90% of the time, about Alaskan History about 9% of the time. The remaining 1% covered everything else. A couple minutes on the revolutionary war. Nothing on the civil war, 1812, spanish/american, early american history, ancient history, Vietnam, Korea, Greece, Roman Empire, Ottomans, Persia, etc., on and on.

Imp- I know gestapo and 9/11.

 

[I have WHAT in my yard?]

I am still working on this one....

What that is missing from our understanding of history is important. There is no way to know all of history so how do we decide what they need to know??

 

[mom'sfolly]

Like Imp, I graduated from somewhat larger well funded school district in Alaska, in 1981. I also attended a smaller town HS in Alaska. Korean war had maybe a mention, Vietnam was still far to recent to mention, so WWI and WWII were it. I also had Alaska history, of which I remember nothing; and a world history class that started with Greece and Sparta, so you can guess how much was spent on the twentieth century. Of course the world history class did not include any part of the world except Europe and North America. They might have gotten far enough into Asia and Africa to mention Mesopotamia and Egypt, but we weren't clear on where they were either.

I think most American schools do a very poor job of teaching history. They make it the dull stuff of dates and names but leave out all the meat because it might be to contraversial. For instance Pilgrims were good farmers who were in the colonies to establish freedom of religion...not that they were zealots who had been run out of two countries, didn't favor the freedom of religion of any but there own, branded non-believers and farmed on land that was cleared by Indians who had died in a European plague.

Hijack...Imp did you play basketball? I just wonder if you might have played against my brother. I think he was the SE free throw champ in 1977.

 

[Q9]

Yikes. What's the old saying? "Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it." And why, exactly, have students not been learning about 9-11?! It was a turning point comparable to the attack on Pearl Harbor or the firing on Fort Sumter - one that dramatically altered the course of the country. Maybe not to quite the same magnitude, but nobody can deny that it was a critical moment.

All American citizens need to have at least a basic understanding of America's major wars and turning points, and a basic understanding of the competing ideologies. It's interesting how a LOT of people simply think Communism = simple dictatorship, without any knowledge of the underlying (but obviously delusional) ideals and goals. Same goes for "democracy" - a lot of folks I talk to think that the United States is a democracy, when it is in reality a constitutional republic.

I'd bet money that most Americans immediately, when asked about causes of the War for Independence, think of "no taxation without representation," and absolutely nothing else. I'd also bet money that half the population doesn't care.

 

[I have WHAT in my yard?]

Q I think you are right on almost all counts there, kiddo.

I know people now who - despite all of the intense things going on in the world and at home - still think it does not effect them and so they do not watch news or read newspapers or magazines other than Vogue or ESPN News.

Most Americans swear this is a democracy specifically because we teach them that.

No one knows what happened in the past, history is written by the victors.......

 

[eenie114]

How can they not know about 9-11?

This is insane. My dad is a police officer, so it's important to me, but still.
I bet I know what those teachers were thinking. "Oh, we can't traumatize the poor little dearies!"

 

[I have WHAT in my yard?]

Quote:
That is the only thing we can come up with. For one thing many schools did not have a curriculum for how to teach it, it was treated as a traumatic event and dealt with by the school counselors. Then it was dropped for four years. By then most of this group was in high school and recent history is not a big draw there.

The ones who lived in Northern New Jersey had family members directly effected so they know it was a big deal and what "happened" but not what "happened"......

 

[KristyHall]

Quote:
agreed over simplification is as dangerous as no knowledge at all on these issues. There is no such thing as one side being completely good and the other being completely bad or there being any real distinctive sides in every case. It's scary just how ignorant people are of history, laws, constitution and so on.

 

[mom'sfolly]

I think that history is taught without any controversy because it is easier. You don't have to argue with parents about the issues if you ignore the issues. In my case, Vietnam was too close, and too painful for it to be taught in the schools. If you don't even mention it, then you don't have to talk about the social unrest it caused, the unpopularity of a draft, the number of dead, the imperial history that lead to the war, the illegal war in Laos, bailing out the French, the fall of Saigon etc, etc, etc.

In the case of 9/11, you don't have to talk about the failures of the intelligence community, the failures of airport security, radical Islam and its causes, funding for international terrorism and all kinds of other sticky situations. That doesn't even touch the situation with the wars in Iraq and Afganistan.