# How are Americans taught about Vietnam? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [December 2, 2014, 3:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-are-americans-taught-about-vietnam/706129 "2014-12-02T15:46:11Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Shodan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9f8e36/32.png) [@Shodan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shodan)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2014, 9:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-are-americans-taught-about-vietnam/706129/21 "2014-12-02T21:18:50Z")
Viet Nam wasn’t history for me; it was current events. Regards, Shodan ---
**Author:** ![CrazyCatLady](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/dfb087/32.png) [@CrazyCatLady](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CrazyCatLady)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2014, 9:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-are-americans-taught-about-vietnam/706129/22 "2014-12-02T21:38:57Z")
I graduated in '94, and as others have said, we never got past the 40’s in any history class I ever took. We always lingered for months over the colonial period and Revolutionary War, then covered the War of 1812, etc, then lingered for a month or two over the Civil War, at which point it was the end of April and we crammed the next 75 years into the last month. The real kick in the shorts is that I couldn’t tell you very much about the stuff we covered so many times because it was all so amazingly dull. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2014, 9:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-are-americans-taught-about-vietnam/706129/23 "2014-12-02T21:43:10Z")
Another person who went through school while the Vietnam War was still current events. As I recall, the most recent events we were taught as history were the break-up of the European colonial empires and the Space Race. ---
**Author:** ![Sattua](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sattua/32/11906_2.png) [@Sattua](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sattua)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2014, 9:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-are-americans-taught-about-vietnam/706129/24 "2014-12-02T21:48:18Z")
Graduated in '98. History, according to what I remember learning in school, consists of the following events: 1. The land bridge to Asia 2. Exploration of the New World 3. The American Revolution 4. The Civil War 5. Post Civil War expansion and discontent. No Vietnam there. What scraps I have of European history came from novels we read in the literature courses. ---
**Author:** ![madmonk28](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/madmonk28/32/20811_2.png) [@madmonk28](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/madmonk28)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2014, 9:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-are-americans-taught-about-vietnam/706129/25 "2014-12-02T21:51:22Z")
I graduated in 1985, every year we ran out of time before we got to Vietnam. As said upthread, I suspect that wasn’t an accdent. ---
**Author:** ![Greg\_Charles](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/839c29/32.png) [@Greg\_Charles](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Greg_Charles)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2014, 10:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-are-americans-taught-about-vietnam/706129/26 "2014-12-02T22:01:32Z")
My experience from the 1980s matches a lot of everyone here. Each year ran out of school days before running out of history, so we pretty much got to WWII and that was it. I always thought that was due to a mixture of teachers’ poor planning and students’ indolence. However, **madmonk** could be right that it was intentional. ---
**Author:** ![Martin\_Hyde](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/47e85d/32.png) [@Martin\_Hyde](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Martin_Hyde)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2014, 11:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-are-americans-taught-about-vietnam/706129/27 "2014-12-02T23:19:45Z")
> [@Zsofia](#): > > 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. Vietnam is actually ruled by the Communist party but isn’t communist in any meaningful way. ---
**Author:** ![Dale\_Sams](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/779978/32.png) [@Dale\_Sams](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dale_Sams)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2014, 11:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-are-americans-taught-about-vietnam/706129/28 "2014-12-02T23:39:15Z")
> [@Motorgirl](#): > > 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. I seem to recall that as well. I took a couple of ‘war classes’ as electives but they were film classes. However, now that I think about it…it seems that the Vietnam War is the least whitewashed. I can’t think of an major myths off the top of my head. ---
**Author:** ![DCnDC](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dcndc/32/2842_2.png) [@DCnDC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DCnDC)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2014, 11:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-are-americans-taught-about-vietnam/706129/29 "2014-12-02T23:59:36Z")
I went to HS in the early 90s. I don’t recall even getting up to WW1. We got up to the Civil War and the Reconstruction, then pretty much skipped straight to current (domestic) events; the last year we had to take a history class was a presidential election year (1992; IIRC graduation requirements only required 2 history credits). ---
**Author:** ![BOOM](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/c4cdca/32.png) [@BOOM](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BOOM)\ **Post date:** [December 3, 2014, 12:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-are-americans-taught-about-vietnam/706129/30 "2014-12-03T00:09:47Z")
You kind of missed the whole empire period? ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [December 3, 2014, 12:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-are-americans-taught-about-vietnam/706129/31 "2014-12-03T00:18:12Z")
As I recall, we never even got as far as World War I in my high school. There was certainly never any mention of Vietnam or Korea, or the Cold War. No current events at all. And yes, I’m pretty sure it was intentional. ---
**Author:** ![SaharaTea](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9a140/32.png) [@SaharaTea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SaharaTea)\ **Post date:** [December 3, 2014, 1:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-are-americans-taught-about-vietnam/706129/32 "2014-12-03T01:53:57Z")
Graduated in '95. I can’t recall my high school history class going much past JFK’s assassination in 1963. It wasn’t until college that I actually learned about Vietnam, and I was a history major. In grad school I was a teaching assistant for an upper-level undergraduate class on the 1960s. Most of what the students knew about Vietnam seemed to be limited to movies like **Platoon** and **Forrest Gump**. But some of my students had family members who served, and it was interesting to hear their stories. It was important for them to learn that not every experience was the same, in both Vietnam itself and at home. ---
**Author:** ![marshmallow](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/df705f/32.png) [@marshmallow](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/marshmallow)\ **Post date:** [December 3, 2014, 2:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-are-americans-taught-about-vietnam/706129/33 "2014-12-03T02:44:28Z")
Graduated 2004. Everything post WWII was rushed. Vietnam was a bullet point of the Cold War, superficially covered. Domino theory, increasing advisors, guerrilla war, Vietnamization, protests, the retreat from Saigon, and the boat people was the extent of it. If I remember right, after that we jumped ahead to the space shuttle and the Challenger disaster. The last topics were the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Gulf War. Not much detail, since it was the very end of the year. I remember glasnost and perestroika being vocab words. ---
**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\ **Post date:** [December 3, 2014, 4:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-are-americans-taught-about-vietnam/706129/34 "2014-12-03T16:23:11Z")
> [@Motorgirl](#): > > 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. My first official history class was 7th grade (Texas History); we had “social studies” until then, which was a mish-mash of geography, history and sociology. The 8th grade course was US history, and we learned about ALL the explorers of N. America, and all the colonies, and about the natives / settler interactions, along with the Triangular Trade. Then we briefly talked about the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War and the Gold Rush/Manifest Destiny, and it was off to Slavery!, with a bunch of talk about the expansion of the Union, and the Compromise of 1850, and the lead-up to the Civil War. After that, the Emancipation Proclamation, Reconstruction and the Radical Republicans, and then Jim Crow Laws. Then Cowboys, Cattle Drives and the Wild West. Then it got more and more disjointed, with some confuseed mention of the Spanish American War, and WWI. Then WWII in a very cursory way, and the year was over. Based on our curriculum, you’d have thought that US history over some 330 years (at that point) was entirely dominated by slavery and its effects, which is not the case; if you were to teach about the 1950s, would you blather on about Jim Crow laws and “Separate but Equal”, or would you talk about the post-war economic boom and the Cold War? Our curriculum would have done the former, to the almost total exclusion of the latter. High school was better; we got through about the early 1970s, and didn’t spend nearly so long on the colonial period, although we got into too much detail on a lot of things, IMO. ---
**Author:** ![astorian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ad7895/32.png) [@astorian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astorian)\ **Post date:** [December 3, 2014, 6:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-are-americans-taught-about-vietnam/706129/35 "2014-12-03T18:04:20Z")
I finished high school in 1979. Our American hstory classes concluded right around the start of the Cold War. Anything I know about subsequent history, I had to learn from my own reading. ---
**Author:** ![GrumpyBunny](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/bc8723/32.png) [@GrumpyBunny](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GrumpyBunny)\ **Post date:** [December 3, 2014, 6:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-are-americans-taught-about-vietnam/706129/36 "2014-12-03T18:12:52Z")
> [@Mr.Kobayashi](#): > > 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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSHY1_ux8rs) educated after the Fall of Saigon - how was it taught to you? Well, I’m not that young, but I did go to school after the Fall of Saigon. The VietNam war was not covered in my high school at all. Maybe it was too close (the late 1980s). We got through WWII in history, as I recall. My brother, 6 years younger, was taught about it in school. I guess TPTB realized they didn’t have to start off US history with Pilgrims! every year. ---
**Author:** ![Scumpup](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ce73a5/32.png) [@Scumpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scumpup)\ **Post date:** [December 3, 2014, 6:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-are-americans-taught-about-vietnam/706129/37 "2014-12-03T18:22:03Z")
Graduated in 1980. The war wasn’t addressed at all in my history classes. The most recent history we covered was JFK’s assassination and we only did that because the teacher was something of a conspiracy nut. ---
**Author:** ![tonyfop](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/85f322/32.png) [@tonyfop](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tonyfop)\ **Post date:** [December 3, 2014, 6:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-are-americans-taught-about-vietnam/706129/38 "2014-12-03T18:38:54Z")
Graduated in 1988. Finished WWII with a week to go. Spent a week on Korea, Civil Rights, and Vietnam. Not much learning done. ---
**Author:** ![Red\_Wiggler](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/red_wiggler/32/13190_2.png) [@Red\_Wiggler](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Red_Wiggler)\ **Post date:** [December 3, 2014, 6:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-are-americans-taught-about-vietnam/706129/39 "2014-12-03T18:46:41Z")
Is it still too fresh in the minds of so many still alive that it remains one of those “taboo” political topics that we can’t bring up with friends or family? From someone who turned 18 in 1971 I can tell you that some pretty hurtful things were said by one generation to another during that time and it can cause a lot of familial damage to bring it up again if you don’t have to. ---
**Author:** ![Hermitian](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hermitian/32/470_2.png) [@Hermitian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hermitian)\ **Post date:** [December 3, 2014, 7:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-are-americans-taught-about-vietnam/706129/40 "2014-12-03T19:12:15Z")
> [@marshmallow](#): > > Graduated 2004. Everything post WWII was rushed. Vietnam was a bullet point of the Cold War, superficially covered. Domino theory, increasing advisors, guerrilla war, Vietnamization, protests, the retreat from Saigon, and the boat people was the extent of it. Graduated in 2000. I think we only got past WWII once and it was very rushed. Anything I know about US history post WWII was not from a classroom. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-are-americans-taught-about-vietnam/706129.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-are-americans-taught-about-vietnam/706129.md?page=3)