We didn’t study anything about the American revolution in school.
We did Romans, Tudors, the Victorians, the Norman Conquest, the English Civil Wars, the Agricultural Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, World War 1 and a bit of World War 2.
We didn’t even cover important topics like the Glorious Revolution, the Anglo-Saxons, our Celtic history, the Dark Ages, the greater Napoleonic Wars or a million other important details of our history.
Wow. I gotta say that sounds like a pretty minimal education. What were they teaching you?
I mean, I understand that in any given year you don’t get everything. But people get a lot of years of schooling, and history should be one of the big things you have every year - which amounts to a lot history. And taught right, it’s an extremely interesting course,. They should go back to oral examinations, too: if students were encouraged to talk about history, and explain what they know, and how things happened, they’d be more interested and more capable of seeing the linsk between things.
I’m also amused by the notion that British schools ignore almost any American history, since the revolution had a critical impact on the nation and Britain’s strategic direction. And of course, Americans study the history of Britain in a lot of detail, and usually Egypt, Greece, Rome, and Spain in lesser detail.
Hmm, maybe American opinions are just skewed because we spend so much time studying world history, not needing as much time to go over our own (with it being so much shorter).
BarryB had it right. Kids get taught national mythology in school. Defeats don’t tend to get incorporated into national mythology.
I don’t know - America’s loss in Vietnam is a pretty important part of our history, and we definitely covered it in high school.
Depends on the nation. We studied the Roman-Jewish wars very extensively in school.
How is that a minimal education? How can you expect to teach a subject like the Tudors or Roman occupation of the British isles in anything less than a complete term of history lessons, at least? The Tudor period saw the rise of England as a world power.
How do you square this with the fact that British history education is basically years of learning about invasions by foreign powers?
Really? Have you never heard Brits talk about the “Dunkirk spirit,” or what about the Chinese Communists and the Long March? Heck, what about Americans and Pearl Harbor or 9/11?
Since the question has been answered and this is now just sharing what we were taught;
(Arkansan)
History class from kindergarten to about 9th grade was pilgrims -> slavery -> american revolution -> more slavery -> civil war -> oops out of time.
Our curriculum did call for an Arkansas history class but my grade didn’t take it because they shuffled around the requirements before and after the year we were supposed to.
High school world history was a broad overview of “what life was like” in Mesopotamia, then Greco-Roman times, then Dark Ages Europe, then the Industrial Revolution. We spent several weeks doing 20th century world history - both World Wars and the Cold War, dismantling of empires, etc. Come to think of it there was very little in the way of Chinese or Arabic history covered. I think at least a day spent learning who Mohammed was would have been infinitely more valuable to us than a week on the battles and turning points of WWI.
High school American history was pretty thorough but historical accuracy hasn’t caught up with the 20th c. yet. We were pretty honest about the treatment of Indians, and the causes of the civil war, and the underlying corruption and excesses of the Gilded Age. But it ends about there - the Depression is a thing that somehow just happened, and WW2 was Americans jumping in to save the day. We paid special attention to civil rights/equality movements and I feel like we covered that fairly well, but what I remember us talking about Vietnam was lame “Our trillions in technological superiority couldn’t win against librul defeatists back home” style stuff, don’t even bother questioning our rationale for being there in the first place. At least they covered “technical” history well, ie dates, names, places, actions, if they left out the backstory of why.
Where I was world history started in first grade. We all picked out of a hat and got a country to study and present. I got New Zealand, Which had less history then America. I have vague memories of copying out of the World Book encyclopedia, and drawing lot of pictures of sheep and birds.
Kind of difficult to ignore the Norman Conquest.
Yeah, but isn’t that really taught as a celebration of a defiant spirit? After all, Israelis even regard Masada as a moral victory, do they not?
Those are just trying episodes which preceded ultimate victory. Battles were lost, but the war was won.
Well, you can only sweep so many humiliating losses under the rug. 
Seriously, the “invaders” in British history always wind up getting absorbed into the national identity: the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, the Danes, the Normans – they are not just invaders, they are British ancestors.
I did though have a curious exchange with a French teenager a few years ago about de Gaulle. Either he’d missed the classes or WW2 almost didn’t happen.
Never mind the content, but I just had to ask: Are you really the US Bureau of Labor Statistics? Posting as a corporate entity? If so, you could settle a lot of the disputes on these boards. 
Also, can we call you U for short?
Ontarian here. Yes, I learned about how Laura Secord ran barefoot down a dirt road to save some place that’s name eludes me from the Americans. We captured one of their Generals named “Hull,” and then we took Detroit and Maine by force.
What always interested me is how the American Revolutionary war (which, for all intents and purposes, created the bulk of English Canada through fleeing loyalists), got so comparatively little coverage in our text books. Then we had a little section about confederate bank robbers in Canada during the Civil War. A half paragraph about Canadian soldiers in Korea.
And then an entire chapter devoted to Canada’s biggest bravest and most glorious war ever: the Boer War. :smack:
They were still defeats. Anyway, what about the Scots and Culloden? And don’t I remember hearing that Serb national identity is largely built around the memory of some catastrophic defeat they suffered long ago (I forget thee name of the battle, but I am fairly sure it was the Serbs)? I rather think that there are many more examples in world history. National mythology and identity often encompasses resentment at historic defeats and teh pride that comes from not having been completely destroyed by it.
Of course, none of this is relevant to the American Revolution (or “War of Independence” as it is usually known in Britain), since, as many have already pointed out, both at the time, and since, it was not regarded as a terribly significant defeat. The American rebels (unlike, say, the Germans at Dunkirk) were not any sort of existential threat to the British nation.
Oh, rubbish. It led, ultimately, to the loss of the bulk of the North American continent. (Which could have been British, if the British had managed to maintain the loyalty of their colonists.)
I’d call that a “significant” loss.
As for the British defeat not being regarded as “terribly significant” at the time:
Sounds to me like the British at the time regarded the loss as significant. “Terribly,” even. 
He may have been the first but there had only been PM’s for 60 years at that point, he was about 13th. Unlucky for some.
Fair point. Out of curiosity, how many PMs have been forced out by a motion of no confidence in the years since? (I don’t know the answer myself.)
Anyway, the point is that the loss was obviously taken quite seriously at the time. I am guessing it was downplayed by later historians, either consciously or unconsciously, owing to considerations of national pride. Fox and the grapes and all that.
And just to be clear, I am not taking a shot at my British friends. It is perfectly understandable that the British would approach the event in this way. That’s just the way national history gets passed down.