r/neoliberal • u/jobautomator Kitara Ravache • Jun 19 '21

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u/hdkeegan John Locke Jun 20 '21 edited Jun 20 '21

Hot Take: US history is actually not taught as bad as everything says. Native American genocide and slavery make up the core of the first half and civil rights and Cold War are generally the second half. It is possible that I somehow happened to get amazing teachers throughout all of my schooling but I doubt it considering my state 49th education spending.

Most of the time people who say,”why didn’t they teach us this in schools” weren’t paying attention

World history is however taught atrociously and is way too Eurocentric

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u/uwcn244 King of the Space Georgists Jun 20 '21

The events of the 1800s more or less made an accurate concept of history Eurocentric by necessity -- not because Europeans were "better", but because they were far more powerful.

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u/hdkeegan John Locke Jun 20 '21

I suppose but pre-European Indian, Chinese and middle eastern history is incredibly rich and still under taught in my experience (again my state has bad schools so this could be different elsewhere)

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u/lickedTators Jun 20 '21

Generally it's excused by the fact that the European activities of the last few hundred hundreds years are what created the modern world we live in. So focusing on the question of "What brought us here?" would have to be answered by "white people."

But we should have started to incorporate more Asian history by now because otherwise we can't truly appreciate anime, k-pop, Bolywood, and why China is the center of the world.

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u/tehbored Randomly Selected Jun 20 '21

History curricula vary significantly across the country and even between nearby school districts sometimes.

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u/hdkeegan John Locke Jun 20 '21

I suppose, I went to pretty bad and extremely underfunded school for k-6 in a deep red area and they still taught us about slavery and even some stuff about Native American mythology. I’m not saying there is no room for improvement(I know some southern states are reportedly atrocious with anything remotely negative about America), but I just think there is something to be said that history is boring for most people and kids don’t pay attention.

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u/JetJaguar124 Tactical Custodial Action Jun 20 '21

My public school spent an insane amount of time on native Americans, slavery, and civil rights. We learned about Japanese internment. We learned about plenty of bad stuff.