Don't they teach anything about Other Countries in US Schools?

In My Humble Opinion
61

Well, I can’t remember much of high school (it was like, 6 years ago for me), though I do recall that the US History class that I took via correspondance (fun story, that one) to complete my graduation requirements was fairly detailed up to around the end of Vietnam, where it quickly became thinner and thinner until it had a brief mention of Clinton recently being elected President (I took the class in 2001, of course).

When I took a US Military History class in college (covering from the late 1600’s until the end of Vietnam), the professor explained that most US history classes don’t cover anything much later than Vietnam because, from a historical standpoint, it’s not history yet. Or at least, not history in a way that is well-enough understood to start teaching it in classrooms. In any case, I can tell you where Vietnam is, the fact that they use a tonal language (which is a pain in the ass for Western speakers like me, as I have recently discovered while studying Mandarin Chinese), and a number of the major campaigns (though the only ones I took great enough interest in to remember are the Ia Drang Valley campaign and the Tet Offensive, along with some of the air campaigns such as Rolling Thunder and the Linebacker raids).

That said, I consider myself to be rather well-read on things outside of the US, but I’m a geek anyways. That said, I didn’t know Ireland had it’s own language until I was in college, nor did I know that Yiddish and Hebrew were different languages until my junior year of high school. The thing about Indonesia I didn’t know, but I’ve still yet to have anyone explain to me why I care about Indonesia’s religious breakdown aside from that fact that quite a bit of our maritime trade goes past Indonesia via the Strait of Malacca, and that piracy is a problem there. I can point Iraq on a map to you, but I wasn’t able to properly visualize where Afghanistan was in relation to Iraq until some time in 2003 or 2004.

That said, finally linking up the locations of Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and Russia all together in my head does give a better contextual understanding to how various countries act when dealing with eachother. Of course, since I’m in the Air Force, knowing what’s going on in various hard to pronounce areas in the world is probably more pertinent to me than it is to say, my friend in Huntsville whose main interests are microbiology and Paul McCartney (or, as she prounces his name: “sigh**PAULMCCARTNEY!”, since unlike her, I’m fairly likely to be writing post cards from such places in the forseeable future.

As for knowing the location of countries in Europe and Africa being more important than the locations of Michigan (it’s the state shaped more or less like your right hand, IIRC), and Texas (for the last freaking time, we’re NOT PART OF THE SOUTH), states in the US can and do often have rather differing cultures, though we at least usually speak something close to the same language. Whether or not it’s terribly important that your average Californian be able to find Michigan or New York or Kentucky, they may very well be more likely to have to go to one of those places than, say, Lithuania, Kenya, Taiwan, or Indonesia.

Now, I want to know if your typical tourist at Euro-Disney can find the location of Washington, D.C. and tell me the official language of the State of Texas. Or, for that matter, if they happen to know what the religion of the majority of Indonesia is. :smiley:

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What makes you say that?

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I hope, from all of the above posts, OP can see that the curriculum in US schools varies greatly. There is no national curriculum in the US. Each state determines its official curriculum, but local school districts determine how that curriculum is to be taught. (A local school district is often a separate political entity from local city government.)

It also depends upon recent political developments. The “No Child Left Behind” Act effectively forced school districts to adapt to some kind of state standard. This was a bill with no carrot but a pretty big stick: “Without ‘accountability’ tests, you won’t get federal funding.” Local districts had been getting a lot of money from the feds by way of their state for decades. With NCLB, they have to jump through a lot of testing hoops to get the money that was once perfunctory.

I doubt that Irish is the official language of Ireland is emphasized much in any state curriculum that satisfies NCLB.

BTW: Can you name the four official languages of Switzerland? (All FOUR.)

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Without Google.

65

I’m sure I’m wrong, but I can’t help but ask. When you say ‘run down’, you don’t mean what I hope you don’t mean, do you? (that is to say, you’re not labouring under the apparently not-uncommon misconception that all rivers flow south, are you?)

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French, German, Italian, Romansch. But I didn’t learn that at school.

I must say I don’t recall much teaching about the details of foreign countries in school geography classes here. It was all about rocks and land use, IIRC. I reckon the best way to teach kids about other countries is to just give them a decent atlas, and let them get on with it.

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French, German, Italian, and… uhm… Swedish Chef? :confused:

Yeah, Canada has that one river that flows East, right? :smiley:

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I think peoples experiences are generally quite local. I could rattle off most of the suburbs in my city. I could probably tell you most of the districts in the north part of my country. When you go further south things become more vague. I think that applies to most people on a global scale. People, like places, also become more general. You start getting North Americans. And Asians. And Africans. And Europeans.

I also think that most high school history would probably be quite local as well, or at least biased towards social memory. I know mine pedalled the harmonious race relations line, emphasising the egalitarian roots of the New Zealand specimen through popular protest against segregation overseas while ignoring racial crackdowns on immigration which stand to question that notion. I’d imagine it would be similar elsewhere.

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Yeah, I’ll be the first to admit my high school education was terrible… I had a lot of catching up to do when I got to college. I had a World History class but I came into it halfway through the year, and it was a very Eurocentric course at any rate.

I have to get a little defensive about being called out on not knowing there is an Irish language. I knew of the existence of Gaelic, but I thought it was a dead language, would not have considered it ‘‘speaking Irish’’ either. Because the truth is I don’t know much at all about that region of the world. I don’t know how long Ireland has been Ireland, but I rather assumed Gaelic existed long before Ireland did.

I just don’t think it’s reasonable to expect every American to know everything about every country. I’m not arguing that our educational system is not flawed – clearly we’ve got some serious problems. But I would personally rather not be counted among those who are ignorant about the world. Ask me about NAFTA and Mexico. Ask me about The Spanish Civil War and the dictatorship of General Franco. Ask me about the socialist movement of Salvador Allende in the 1970s in Chile. Hell, I even know a little bit about Heian Japan. You will find I know a little more about the world than you might suppose based on my lack of knowledge of the Irish language. I have to question your measuring stick here.

Though I have to admit, if someone doesn’t know where Australia is, that is a problem. It’s pretty hard to miss on a world map.

I had my own ‘‘WTF’’ moment the other day when a very educated relative of mine admitted he did not know who Hernán Cortés was. I took it for granted that everybody knew about Cortés. So I admit, education is going downhill.

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From a Dutch POV, that is remarkable. No elementary school in Holland teaches kids about local history (city, province) even though most cities are brimming with history; two thousand years to several hundred years of *written *history that can still be pointed out in landmarks, houses, and more in general in the way things still work today. City history, over here, is something only tourist guides and retirees study. I wonder why that is, considering most USA cities will have no more then 200 years of history and what history there is roughly the same, depending on the time the Frontier moved.

In the Netherlands, as far as I remember we were taught in elementary school:
[ul]
[li]History of the Netherlands, starting 200 BC. The usual starting point is “when the tribe of Bataviers came canoeing down the river Rhine and set up camp in the marshland that was Holland”. Lots of dates, especially wars and treaties. [/li][li]Geography of the Netherlands: provinces and their capitals, rivers and landmarks. [/li][li]Other countries on the map and the name of their capitals. Usually a kid will have to do a papier on one or two other countries and know a bit about those, but not about others. [/li][li]In highschool, more was history was taught, especially more recent Dutch history, with a disproportional amount of attention for the Second World War. By graduation, we were all more then fed up with the WW2. Not much was taught about our past with Indonesia. Indonesia is our Vietnam, the Dutch waged war on it in 1948 to stop it from wanting independence. In hindsight, the Dutch were 100 % bad guy there; we didn’t want to lose our most profitable colony. But that shameful part of history hardly gets any attention, just like the western evil partaking in the Crusades. In contrast, German kids get to hear ad nauseam about the part of the common German population in the rise of Nazism and the atrocities it caused. [/li][/ul]

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You may jest, but apparently, it’s not all that uncommon a notion. If you happen to live on a big stretch of south coast, it would be an easy trap to fall into, I suppose

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Yep, I remember teachers in elementary school making a point of saying that the Nile flowed north, since that’s out of the norm. Later on in high school or college I had to deal with the weirdness of Upper Egypt being below Lower Egypt on most maps due to this.

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We had a couple of German students when I was at Uni, and over a couple of beers in the student bar one day we were discussing history, when they admitted that their education regarding the period 1933-1945 could best be described as “Scene Missing”… they were aware that Hitler had come to power in the 30’s… and suddenly it’s 1945 and the Russians are having campfires in the Reichstag and everyone wants to go and live on the American side of Berlin. Things like The Holocaust had been glossed over (“Some of ze Nazis did some Very Bad Things during Ze War”, vhich is vhy being a Nazi is Bad, M’kay?") and the whole “Hitler invading Europe” was hand-waved away as being “Historically justified at the time”.

Now, I’m fairly sure that the German school curriculum teaches more about WWII than that, but I know the Japanese like to pretend that nothing of interest happened between 1941-1945 (“The Imperial Japanese Military were on an overseas holiday! Nothing Unusual Happened! The Emperor Was Betrayed By Weaklings! There Will Be No Further Questions!”)

FWIW, we were taught a lot about History and Geography when I was at school in New Zealand, which was amusing because New Zealand’s non-military history stopped being interesting in about 1908. Fortunately, the rest of the world had lots of interesting stuff happening to keep us occupied with learning about it. :wink:

Geography tended to focus on The World, with an emphasis on anywhere that had been part of the British Empire. It was (correctly) assumed that we already knew a fair bit about UK and US geography and history from TV, so we did a fair bit on Australia and Africa, as well as Europe and South America as well

History tended to revolve around Medieval England, Colonial New Zealand, WWI (with an emphasis on Gallipoli), The Russian Revolution, The Rise of Nazism, WWII, and a brief afterword to the effect that New Zealand was involved in Vietnam but got out long before the whole thing went pear-shaped.

To be fair, I’ve always had an interest in history & geography, so I don’t consider myself a “typical” person when it comes to that sort of thing, since I’ve gone out of my way to learn as much about it as I can over the years…

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I have no cite for this, so you’ll have to trust me:

I am a postal worker. Moreover, I am an Australian postal worker. Even more moreover :smiley: I am an Australian postal worker who works in a specialist section dealing with incoming mail from overseas. In other words, I AM THE GUY WHO HAS TO SEND STUFF BACK TO FREAKING’ AUSTRIA, WHERE IT WAS SUPPOSED TO GO IN THE FIRST PLACE!! I’m sure there is an Austrian postal “brother” of mine working somewhere on the nightshift in Vienna, doing the opposite.

Austrian mail misdirected to Australia falls into three basic types:

  1. Ex-Germany/Switzerland, only with mail that has “Austria” written in English - Australia/Austria are very different from one another in German. (30%)

  2. Ex-USA (60%)

  3. Everywhere else in the world combined (10%)
    Roughly.
    None of the other English-speaking countries seem to have this problem. I might get a couple of Austrian letters each from Canada, the UK, NZ, etc, and several sacks of the things from the USPS.

I make no comment about this, but present it for you to ponder.

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I got a very good education in Geography and history in Texas, but that was 45-50 years ago. I think the opportunity to learn these things is still there, but many students don’t make the effort, and a lot of the schools are teaching to the TAKS, TASS (or whatever) tests more than teaching the subjects. Students tend to keep info only long enough to pass the tests, then go out to play, party, etc.

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I was always annoyed at how little of little we learned about the history of other countries in American schools. You’d think that there would be something about Canadian and Mexican history, seeing as they’re big countries that border directly on the US, and we’ve been involved in wars with both of them. But it’s not at all the case. You learn a bit about Mexico regarding the conquest by Cortez, and then about the Alamo and the Mexican-American War. You learn about Canada and the early fur trade, then a bit in the French and Indian War. Most of Canada’s participation in the War of 1812 is ignored, especially the battles the US lost. I never even heard of these until I crossed the border into Ontario and saw the historic markers.

As for other countries, it’s even worse. Unless it’s part of general Western Civilization, or we’ve had a war there (and not always then), you can forget it. The Middle East pretty much disappears after Xerxes.France goes away after Charlemagne (I learned more about the French TRevolution from my Classics Illustrated Special Edition on it than I ever did in public school). We learned a bit about English history, but mainly as it related to general Western Civ and to the formation of the US. After the War of 1812, the UK goes away (except for buying the South’s cotton crop). The only king of Portugal was Henry the Navigator. Spain had Ferdinand and Isabella. The unifications of Italy and Germany? Who cares?

We actually got a smattering of Chinese history in my World Cultures class, but it couldn’t have amounted to more than a day or two. In general, China, India, and all of Africa since the days of Ancient Egypt have no histories, despite having massive populations. Australia was where they dumped the prisoners (which is the same way Georgia got started).

And, of course, it continues. When I visited Madame Tussaud’s in London , I was amazed at the number of politicians displayed – mainly heads of state – of whom I had never heard. Foreign countries only show up on the American media landscape when something awful happens there (especially involving US people or interests), or something photogenic. The media claims that people aren’t interested in other countries, so they don’t cover them. This is absurd. the media is responsible for creating interest in the first place – if they covered other countries in more detail, they’d generate more interest. This current attitude is like not covering, say, Rhode Island because no one’s interested in it, and it’s so small…

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This is very salient, I think. In the UK in the 1980s, my geography classes (which I was allowed to ditch aged 14) were about rainfall in the Upper Volta. And my history focused on specifics: the Tudors, Russian and Chinese revolutions, and the first and second world wars. And that was about it, really. We, too, learned nothing about Ireland.

Everything else I know, I’ve picked up from reading, and the media.

When I’ve suggested on the SDMB that the US media is more insular than most western nations’, and that explains some of the lack of knowledgeability that is so obvious to foreigners, I’ve been jumped on like a ton of bricks and insulted. So I won’t pursue it, but I think that’s the avenue of thought to pursue.

(Though I don’t think it’s PC to learn about India - it’s sensible! Second largest population in the world, and all that.)

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Agreed.
My comment was based on your abridged version, which described people not knowing the majority religion of Indonesia despite the tsunami and the importance of Islam in the media – as though news bulletins would’ve mentioned the religious make-up of Indonesia. When in fact they didn’t (at least, not while I was watching) and it’s of no relevance*.

Seeing what the actual question was is an eye-opener. Although I must admit, while I certainly wouldn’t have said India, your question made me realise I know very little about Armenia (the genocide…and that’s about it).

  • Actually, now I think about it, although it’s not relevant, it would probably be good if news programmes mentioned the culture of nations that may be unfamiliar to the viewer. Too often we see conflicts or disasters in Randomland, and they can seem infinitely far away and impersonal.
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US guy here.
we certainly do teach geography in school here. It is part of the testing process and seems to be taken fairly seriously. The problem, in my opinion, is that for the vast majority of Americans it is not something they will every use again. The rest of the world gets out and moves around a bit, US citizens not very much. If that person in line had no expectation of every visiting Australia or knows anyone who has, the information slips away. Our problem isn’t so much a bad education, as it is a culture of stay at homes. Now on the Dope, the folks here are the exceptions, but in general, Americans are really lazy travelers. Our idea of a vacation is to travel a couple of thousand miles to Vegas (or Disney World etc) for a week.

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The second Monday in October is not Thanksgiving. :stuck_out_tongue: