It did however take a while for that information to really be included. When I was in grade school and middle school (80’s through the early 90’s) most of our US History books kind of trailed off somewhere around the Korean war.
Not that it was important. Lord knows that you don’t have time for Viet-Nam when there’s Sumerians to read about for the first two months of the term.
The weird thing is, I got a good grounding in world history and particularly world geography. (In 9th grade geography we had map tests of every continent and you had to know all the countries, major cities, rivers, important mountains, bodies of water, etc. If you didn’t get most of them you took the damned thing over again until you did. Stupid at the time but well worth it, except when they go changing the names on me.) I know a good bit about Mexican history. But Canada? After, say, the War of 1812? And even before that where they didn’t affect us? No clue.
In fact, in that zombie “not so fun war games” thread, somebody posted some Canadian ones, and my boyfriend was all, “Isn’t it weird to you that Canada has all its own history and stuff, just like ours?” Well, it is weird. I know a lot more about, say, Hungarian history than Canadian history. I know tons more about Japanese history. I’d say that my ignorance of Canadian history almost rivals my ignorance of sub-Saharan African history, which is the one screaming, gaping hole in my education (and I suspect that of many others.) I took an African history class in college and had my mind blown with just how remiss my education was in that area.
I had a mixed education - some years in public schools (K-6) and some in private schools. For the most part geography wasn’t taught, per se. There was US/North American history, though much of that was only how it related to the US. And Mexico was largely ignored.
In 6th grade we did three “world” history units: China, South America, and Canada. The teacher wasn’t very good at keeping on schedule, so the Canadian unit was about a third started when the school year ended. Then in 9th grade my school offered an elective in Russian history that was taught by a pair of teachers with a real passion for the subject, and was grand fun.
A lot of the problem with teaching world history, though is that it becomes hugely difficult to choose where to cut things off: Without the background many things that are vitally important events just seem inane. And communicating that background can be hugely difficult. Just to pick one example not at random - talking about India as a monolithic nation is hugely misleading, and ignores great swathes of history.
Let’s also admit, that IMNSHO most Americans don’t care much about their own history or geography, let alone anyone else’s. You’ll have people who still fight the Civil War, but who can’t explain what Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” was, let alone why the issues of those campaigns might still be relevant today. The constant complaint I remember from my public school days was, “What do we need to know this for?” It wasn’t as present in my private school days, because the majority of the students there linked learning (Or at least pretended to enjoy) history and culture. But there are a lot of people who decide that if something isn’t of immediate practical use, it’s not worth remembering.
I don’t think that’s a distinctly American trait, though given our social isolation from much of the rest of the world, I’ll admit it’s probably worse here than anywhere else in the First World.
As for the assertion that, as an American I should be expected to know that Irish(Gaelic) is the national language of Ireland - piss off. I wear orange on March 17, just because the Boston Irish are so fucking annoying. Not all caucasian Americans have Irish blood, and many of us are sick of being told we should care about Ireland as our spiritual homeland.
And when was the last time a major media story originated in Rhode Island? Seriously, you’ll hear about minor problems in, and around NYC, LA, and DC. But never anything short of a disaster anywhere else in the US. For that matter, the only story I can think of coming out of RI in the past ten years was that club fire. But I know about proposed automobile taxes for Manhattan, dammit. :rolleyes:
The upside of the American obsession with their own history and nobody else’s is that you get to hear about things that would otherwise have been long forgotten. Like in all that “Freedom Fries” brouhaha – some Americans objected to it on the grounds that the French apparently helped them out against the dastardly Brits about 3 million years ago. I had no idea about all that, and I’m sure our French readers (both of them) didn’t either. But apparently in US History classes, things like that and the Spanish-American war are still hot topics of conversation.
Who said you were supposed to know that because Ireland is your spiritual homeland? You should know that for the same reasons you should know where Afrikaans comes from, for example, or that there are a lot of different languages spoken in India.
The French helped us out against the Brits, and within 20 years, the Brits were helping us out against the French. The first chunk of US military history is a cycle back and forth between helping the Brits against the French and helping the French against the Brits, with a couple of breaks to fight the Barbary States over their raiding our merchant ships.
My 0.02 €: It’s probably not the curriculum (in any country) that’s to blame. I read an article in an Italian magazine (on lamentable standards of general education in Italy) a few years ago, and an educationalist stated the following rule of thumb there:
Knowledge retained from school = knowledge as per curriculum, minus the last six years.
From what I see in conversations with people about subjects that aren’t much use in their job (e.g.: maths with non-engineers) this seems to be about right. For example, every German high school (Gymnasium) graduate should, per curriculum, be able do solve equations in vector algebra but of course they don’t. History: The Third Reich took (in my time i.e. the 1970s) a total of about 2 years of history lessons (distributed over year 5-13), so we should, per curriculum, be pretty erudite about it but of course we are not either.
I hear it’s changed now, since St James can’t be called Moor-Killer any more without causing the placards to come up, but I was taught about the Reconquista half a dozen times; the (4 or 5 depending on who’s counting) Carlista Wars of the XIX century only got one mention and it was a portrait of “the Pretender D. Carlos” which some editor must have forgotten to pull off; the only colony whose process of independence got any mention was Cuba; we never got as far as the XX Century (students from the “letters” branch had “Contemporary History,” which was XIX and XX and again didn’t mention the Carlista Wars, but I was from “sciences”).
This seems to be waaaay all-pervading, from conversations with friends and coworkers from other countries. Even in “Universal History,” we got the Greeks (which was 90% Athens) and the Egyptians - but not a word on China or India.
We did get more Geography than Americans seem to, though. Had to be able to place every country in the world and its capital on “blank maps” (with the borders marked); be able to name major rivers and mountains from all continents; and in 10th grade Geography and Social Sciences we learned about climate types and had to do things like guess that the weather graph we’d been given was, say, Sydney (we got the yearly average temps and yearly rain and the latitude).
I think it’s just hard to get plain-old geography in to the “social studies” curriculum in 12 years of school.
I always wondered how countries with really old histories handled being able to pack 2000 years of history in to 12 years of school. Even though America is relatively “new” we still did a LOT of studying on ancient cultures in America and South America. I’m pretty sure we learned about native Americans in elementary, middle and high school.
I do know we did the whole “learn the countries of the world and fill in a blank map” in 6th grade - when there were 2 Germanys and one Czechoslovakia. We did Africa too - which has changed significantly since I was in 6th grade. And for some reason, I don’t recall learning ANYTHING about Asian geography - even though we were in the midst of the Gulf War at the time.
There’s just a lot of things to learn - and a lot of things to forget.
Are you equaling not knowing where a country is with not knowing where a province or state is?
'tain’t quite the same, you know. Even if you were from Texas 
Weeelllll…in terms of numbers of little bitty pieces of land that sorta look the same and are placed near each other on the map, yes. Illinois is larger than England, after all. Y’all only need to know “United States of America” in roughly the same space of the map we’re expected to know 45 European countries that have little or nothing to do with our daily lives.*
In terms of international political import, of course, you’re right. But in terms of feats of memorization, the states are a good comparison to the countries of Europe.
We DO identify ourselves by state here, and we do have friendly (and not-so-friendly) rivalries between states. We even had a war about it at least once. Not recognizing a difference between North Carolina and South Carolina is like not recognizing a difference between Spain and Portugal.
*Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s entirely possible to DO, and I’m working on it now via some fun online games. But yes, I think the comparison is apt.
Geez. Were my teachers especially good? We definitely had world geography and history. I especially remember that in 6th grade, over the course of the year, we went through every continent. My teacher would walk around with the names of the countries in a hat, and whatever country we pulled out we had to do a report on, and then give a presentation on the country for the whole class. I had to do Suriname from when we did South America, and Sri Lanka for when we did Asia, etc. I definitely still remember some of the information, too.
In 10th grade, I had World History, and we had to learn like, *every freaking detail * of European geography. We had to label a very intricate map of Europe with all of the countries, cities, rivers, inlets, ponds, creeks, etc. (I may exaggerate slightly.) This was actually kind of tough because it was 1993, I think, and most of the maps our school had didn’t have whatever the right version of whatever the former Yugoslavia looked like at the moment. We finally found an accurate map in a recent issue of National Geographic. Ahhh, the days before everything in the world was on the web! So much fun!
We didn’t really learn much about other parts of the world unless they had to do with the Western Civilization-style course, though. Like, we did learn about the Japanese invasion of China in the 1930s, but only because it related to World War II.
In general, though, I think I was given a good background in history, which has made me interested in plugging those gaps. Like, right now I’m reading a book on Indian history. History and geography are interesting! Thanks, Ms. Ahern and Mr. Frank!
Another thing – you’d think that, since they don’t really cover anyone else’s history, they’d do a really good job on US history. But 1.) They don’t; and 2.) students generally don’t seem to remember what they’re told anyway.
For 2.), we’ve encountered plenty of examples on our own, and every now and then we read one of those polls showing how ignorant of their own history Amerivcans are. Or we watch Jay Leno’s Jaywalking, or * are youSmarter than a Fifth Grader?* and shake our heads. I don’t know what the solution is. MilliCal seems to know more history than these people.
For 1.0, though, I’m annoyed. They don’t have to go into great depth on a lot of this – they could at least give us the gist of Canadian and Mexican history. They could explain how it was that Florida passed back and forth between British and Spanish hands before becoming part of the Colonies. As things stand, Florida magically appears at one point, with no explanation beyond “Ceded by Spain”. well, WHY, fercryinoutloud?
Similarly, they never told us about the goddamed Gadsden Puchase. It’s just on the map, with a date and a price. WHY? What was the point? They tol us why they spent the big bucks on Louisiana, and on Alaska, but the gadsden , which cost a fair proportion of Louisiana, is just brushed off without a word of explanation. You don’t hasve to go into extraordinary detail – just tell us what happened there.
Did you try saying “Czechoslovakia” instead? Anyone 30 or older probably learned geography before it split up. If we do learn geography, it’s usually in elementary or middle school (age 13 or younger), not high school.
I’m also pretty So-What? about US residents not knowing that Irish is still a living language spoken in Ireland. There are thousands of languages spoken in the world today, certainly we’re not suppose to be list all of them? Even learning the official languages of all the countries in the world seems a bit too much useless trivia to me, and who gets to decide which countries merit having their basic facts memorized in US grade schools?
I would also like to point out to the OP that despite our history of Boston Irish, JFK, and green rivers, Australia still tops the US in terms of percentage of the population of Irish decent. Which may explains why Australians are more familiar with the official languages of Ireland. Just sayin’.
I remember spending ridiculous amounts of time on Prussia for some reason. Prussian kings and queens, court life, political manueverings - maybe half that time was spent on the rest of the world.
Catholic high school class of 1975.
I was a perfect afro wearing, militant back then and our Black History Group studied Africa - once a week for an hour after school. Africa as taught in school was pretty much the Euro-influence on the continent.
I knew about the Irish language. I read Maeve Binchey. (smile)
I had a whole flipping year of it in ninth grade. Granted, that was the broader “geography” which covered cultural and physical geography and some anthropology and stuff. But I know where Burkina Faso is, and Kyrgystan, and Mombasa, and the Orinoco River, etc. I ain’t saying I could fill in a whole blank map, particularly since they keep changing the names on me, but I was lucky enough to have it after the fall of the USSR and I generally don’t need us to go to war with somebody to find out where it is. (East Timor, that I didn’t know.) And that was public schools in one of the worst states for education (thank you, dear Mississippi)
…and is old enough to remember the collapse of Communist Europe, and hopefully have some knowledge of what happened.
But hasn’t always followed these things that closely since they had to know them for geography class. I had the same experience when I went to the Czech Republic last year- I got blank looks when I told people where I was going, until I said “Czechoslovakia”. Then people seemed to know what I was talking about.