To my mind, the English Civil War was, very arguably, more significant; out of that struggle, and the reactions to it, came many of the concepts that found reflection in the American Revolution.
King George III seemed to disagree.
Are you confusing me with another poster. Someone did say that a pundit claimed that that the American Revolution was the most important blah blah blah.
I, however, did not. I was commenting that a teacher thinking the French Revolution was realy so important was odd and probably wrongheaded.
… What? Are you talking to me? Why would you even ask me this? 
Please tell me how you interpret these specific quotes - I’ll narrow it down so you don’t have to look through a bunch:
My interpretations:
-
The AR is totally irrelevant in the context of world history.
-
The AR is not important to anyone besides Americans.
-
US history is irrelevant to the rest of the world.
Are these way off the mark in your opinion?
As to the rest of your questions:
I took Band - which is a fine art. Other students may have taken things like painting or choir instead. I took it for all four years.
Computing was not part of my curriculum in the early 90s - it may have been for others.
Drama was an after school activity for us.
One thing to keep in mind is that since every student was required to take theology as a full schedule course, it left us less time for electives than students at public school s- in a way, it was our elective, except that we didn’t elect to take it 
ETA: sorry I forgot to reply to the Social Studies questions - it’s a generic term in the US, we use it from elementary through high school to describe things like history, culture, politics, etc. For HS, it was all 2 years of global history, 1 year of US history, and 1 year split between economics and political science.
Given the context, I interpret the first quote to mean that the American Revolution was not particularly important to any other country.
I interpret the third one to mean that Americans think everyone in the world learns about American history because, “America, fuck yeah!”
Mine also suffered from Fox-Newsd style editing, leaving off the bit where I said that when you grew up with a Norman castle around the corner from your house (and I did, it was about a ten minute walk away), THEN a little spat across the pond pales into insignificance. I was clearly repeating what others had said about how local history generally speaking trumps all others. I’m sorry, but I grew up somewhere with a lot of local history.
Same here. I went to a rather traditional independent school run by Irish priests out in the Warwickshire countryside. Physics, chemistry, biology and computing were all separate subjects - no “science” course - as were history and geography - no “humanities” course.
Also from the age of 14 onwards (4th form and upwards for the GCSEs) the only mandatory subjects were maths, English language, English literature and religious studies. I actually dropped history at the end of third form (age 13-14).
I didn’t think anyone would read all of the quotes if I included the entire posts - and, yes, I did pick out the parts that stood out as indicating that the poster didn’t think that the AR was relevant to world history. It would have been kind of silly to leave those parts out considering that the poster had asked me to find posts were someone had said the AR was irrelevant.
But you did say that the AR paled into insignifignce.
Main Entry: in·sig·nif·i·cant
: not significant: as a : lacking meaning or import : inconsequential b : not worth considering : unimportant c : lacking weight, position, or influence : contemptible d : small in size, quantity, or number
Perhaps you meant to say that it pales in significance? That would be different than saying that it actually becomes insignificant due to your surroundings.
I used the term science in describing our schedule because we always had 1 science course in each year. They were:
Freshman: Earth Science
Sophomore: Chemistry
Junior: Biology
Senior: Physics
Geography was often blended into our history courses, but we spent more time on this junior high school than in high school.
Regarding the first one, why would you use the words “not particularly important” rather than the poster’s actual words, which were “totally irrelevant.”
What is the justification for the switch?
ETA: also, I don’t see why the poster of the third quote would say “just how irrelevant US history is” unless he or she thought that US history was irrelevant. Now, they may well have intended to express the principal you state as your reading of their statement, but they also seem to be clearly indicating their belief that US history is irrelevant, which I believe to be incorrect.
I think people are (perhaps unnecessarily) using hyperbole to drive the point home that we don’t go into any kind of meaningful depth in the subject in Britain. Not a particularly useful thing to do in a thread in GQ I have to say.
Sorry, mate, but there is no way in the world that I’m going to look back in the thread to hunt for those posts and see the context they were posted in; it’d take bloody ages!
Taking them out of context, and with no links, renders them meaningless. It’d be like taking the word ‘meaningless’ out of this post and quoting it as saying that the AWI was meaningless.
No - that’s crazy. If I wanted to misquote you, I’d do this:
:D:D:D
ETA: I am sorry that the links are gone from the posts above, that wasn’t intentional and I didn’t notice until you mentioned it.
You know what - I regret making this post, it’s needlessly pedantic and argumentative.
I apologize if you don’t think I treated your previous post fairly.
And it’s an American English dictionary link you have quoted, which is slightly less significant than a British English Dictionary 
Sorry
Accepted. If only others (probably including me) could act similarly on this board.
[QUOTE=Spoke;12654226As for what kids are taught, I think it’s telling that Nava’s teachers glossed over Spain’s loss of its own American colonies (even though that was an objectively important event in Spanish history). I suspect that most nations tend to approach their own history with a sort of triumphalism (or at least national pride) and episodes that interfere with that storyline tend to get de-emphasized.[/QUOTE]
We didn’t learn about how our country was built, either, everything was completely Castillian-centric. The Kingdom of Navarre wasn’t mentioned even once in my Spanish History class, and we were in Navarre.
On the other hand, now there are regions whose curriculum is being designed locally and which are completely centered on them; the whole thing stinks of 1984 rewriting, up to and including the creation of some entities which never existed pre-2000A.D. or so. Catalan Empire? What Catalan Empire?
The curriculum is a political instrument. What can turn it into an actual lesson (or refrain from doing so) is the teachers.
Incidentally, I have been to Trujillo (Pizarro’s hometown) a couple of times.
Just showed up for a ‘me too’ post. North-West Rebellion/Louis Riel was elementary school, and the three years of high school were ‘The Industrial Revolution - England and France learned about factories and hygiene’, ‘World History but mostly WWII - hey I get to research Hirohito!’ and then ‘Canada - a couple centuries of fur traders, explorers, missionaries and why did I skip World History for this?’.
My two pennorth (racking my memory), The Normans, the Romans, the Norse invasions plus the civilisations of the the Fertile Crescent and Egypt(junior school)
In Grammar school, Chinese history (from at least the Tang dynasty until the Communist supremacy ) for which I was, and am, mystified as to why we had to study it.
Also the Industrial Revolution, and last but INCREDIBLY boring, the Corn Laws.
I’ve no doubt that we studied other history but can’t remember it.
I seriously think that the topics given us in senior school were chosen as some sort of character test to see if we could still study and absorb knowledge about subjects that seemed to have little relevance to us and that were dull as ditchwater.
(Though I found the earlier Chinese history quite interesting)