Pretty much as the title; how much could an average high school graduate in the U.S. be expected to know about the Vietnam War? Are you a young American educated after the Fall of Saigon - how was it taught to you?
My HS experience may or may not be typical, but our US history classes never made it much past WWII. The single year of European History we got also didn’t get much past WWII. Our single year of World History attempted to give an overview of everything that wasn’t the US or Europe and resulted in a very shallow treatment of everything.
Can’t help answer your question, but as an American whose HS education didn’t cover Vietnam because it was still current events at the time, I’m curious as to whether and how it’s handled more recently.
That was my experience, too. I think they more or less fall behind on purpose so that they don’t end up teaching history our parents remember.
I learned almost nothing about Vietnam in school. Everything I know (which isn’t much) I got from reading old Doonesbury cartoons.
I suspect Motorgirl’s experience is typical. By the end of US History, the year is coming to a close and “the 60s” probably are more about the civil rights movement and Earth Day.
Same here. Not much past WW2 in either US History or World History.
Frankly, we never reached the Vietnam War. We barely even reached the beginning of WWII.
I distinctly remember redoing sections over and over again through the years. As in, I’d have American History (Pre-Colonial, Colonial, and Revolutionary War Period) in grade 5, and then American History (Slavery, American Indians, & Civil War) in Grade 6…and then we started over in grade 7 and 8! Grade 7 we were right back doing pre-colonial stuff all over again. And then in grade 9-10 we did world history with a smattering of American involvement. 11-12 history was not required and they didn’t have a whole lot to offer either. My school system was broken up in sections like so: K-3, 4-6, 7-8, 9-12. I can only imagine that the teachers in 7-8 who were pulling a mixed bag of students from the three elementary schools that did 4-6 decided they just needed to re-teach all the material again because they didn’t think all the elementary schools covered it properly, or something.
I vaguely remember something about WWII all the way back in 4th grade. It was the last class and was summed up as, “Hitler was bad and a lot of people died in WWII, OK?”
I had a really stupid moment before 4th grade in which I played the PC game Scorched Earth - when you quit the game, it would give you a famous quote relating to war from world leaders. Of course, I didn’t know the majority of the people saying the quotes, and would write down quotes from Hitler and Mussolini becase the quotes “sounded cool” and put them on my tack board to think about from time to time. Eventually my mother read them and told me who these people were. I was aghast at how ignorant I was and how bad those people were.
In college we also did not reach any further. I had to specifically sign up for electives to even get a class on something like the cold war (and that professor just turned it into a civil rights class anyway…)
If my uncle hadn’t been a Vietnam vet I doubt I would have known anything other than that the country of Vietnam exists and that it contains beautiful terraced rice fields. Our world history text book excelled at pictures but not much else.
At my high school at least, all the US History classes get up to the 90s by the end of the year. The War in Vietnam gets at the very least a week or so of coverage, usually mixed in with social and political upheaval at home during the 60s. Every teacher covers things differently, but all cover it.
I teach European History, but from what I gather from talking to others the sequence covers French colonialism, increasing US involvement, ROE, Cambodia, Tet, Vietnamization, withdrawal and aftermath.
Graduated in 1996. Had a Vietnam vet talk to us in American History class, he said he would answer any question except those concerning him doing any killing. My dad was also a vet so I’d heard a bit about the war in my youth. We covered the Cold War and WW2 in that class too, the teacher was good and I enjoyed the subject.
We aren’t. We never make it past V-J Day.
ETA - I am so ashamed to admit this, because I am an educated and well read person, but I’d never really realized that we lost that war until I saw a No Reservations episode in Vietnam. Like, that Vietnam is still a Communist country. I’m sorry, y’all. I guess I heard tons about the war but not very much about the end of it except that we left, but it didn’t occur to me that we lost it.
We learned about it. Kind of suprised other peopled didn’t, since in my observation kids usually get some sort of treatment of “the sixties” while they’re in school, with Civil Rights, Vietnam, Woodstock and the Johnson/Nixon admins all sort of rolled up in one.
Presumably teachers figure that the combination of sex/drugs/rock-and-roll and the fact that its history the kids parents (or I guess at this point, grandparents) were part of will spurn some interest compared to other historical topics.
We got up through about 1975 or so in my high school history class, but like others have said, the post WWII part was relatively cursory- Vietnam was taught as part of the Cold War containment policy, but with actual US involvement. There wasn’t anything in the way of military history- what we learned concerned itself with the containment of Communism and the war’s effects on the home front, politically and socially.
I think a lot of high school US history curricula overemphasize the colonial and revolutionary periods along with the Civil War/Slavery, and shortchange the late 19th and 20th centuries.
Ours certainly did. From 1st grade onward we learned about the colonial period, revolution and up through Civil War over and over and over. Then in 11th grade we repeated those periods and moved on to the last half of the 19th century and first 45 years of the 20th century. Snooze.
[QUOTE=A Fish Called Wanda]
Otto: We didn’t lose Vietnam! It was a tie!
Archie: I’m tellin’ ya baby, they kicked your ass there. Boy, they whupped yer hide real good!
[/QUOTE]
High school in the 81-82 school year. Like many have mentioned, we ran out of time shortly after WWII (which we spent a month on, as our history teacher was a vet from the European theater). I think we stopped at the Korean War. Our textbook went up to Reagan’s election so there were a few pictures on Vietnam.
I’ve noticed with my kids, today they move even slower. Part of it is over-correcting for “dead-white-male” syndrome. In 5th grade they spend from September to winter break covering indigenous American peoples. Then comes Age of Exploration, then colonial times. The school years ends with Revolutionary War and the Constitutional convention.
8th grade starts with Jamestown, ended with Reconstruction.
4th grade, which was California history, spent 4 months on the Chumash, Mojave, Gabrielino and other California natives. Starting in February went through the mission period, and ended with the Gold Rush. No, they never got to California actually becoming a state.
For future posters it would be interesting to know what years you were in high school to see if the answers change over time.
For me (high school in the late 80’s) we got to discussing the Korean war and McCarthyism before the end of the year. There were portions of the text book going further than that but we didn’t get that far. As far as winning/losing I learned that the US had won every war it had been in except for Vietnam (which it lost) and Korea (which it tied).
All I learned about the Vietnam war was on my own.
I graduated in 89. American history was split into two years, and I would have taken the second year ending in 87. We got at least as far as the beginning of the Reagan administration.
But, everything after WWII was given pretty short shrift and presented in very simplistic terms.
Went to high school in the late 80s. Everything I knew about Vietnam I learned from Doonesbury comics (my dad had a complete collection).
I was in high school during the end of Vietnam, so no, we didn’t cover it in class! 
I graduated HS in 1986, with a 5 on the Advanced Placement exam in U.S. History. We didn’t cover Vietnam at all. In fact, we hardly mentioned anything that happened east of, say, Poland, except for a paragraph on the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in WWII. It’s a national embarrassment.
(Seconding the Doonesbury comics, btw.)