Just to offer an interesting perspective, I of course went to high school in Canada, graduated in 1990, and of course we weren’t in Vietnam.
Yet the experience was much the same as reported here; history class concentrated heavily on the early part of Canada’s history, ending in a desperate sprint to get to World War II.
My daughter, now in Grade 4, is also in a pattern noted here where they haven’t even gotten to the point of the country becoming the country it is; they have spent two years now learning about the First Nations.
I graduated high school in 2007 and I learned nothing about Vietnam. Had you asked me when I was 18 what I knew, I’d probably be able to say
[ul]
[li]The Viet Cong were the enemy and communist[/li][li]We lost[/li][li]Tunnels[/li]MASH was a commentary on it using the Korean War as a overlay[/ul]
Same here…I was a teen ager when we finally pulled out and recall a lot of it on TV (especially the depressing lists ). From my recollection, my eldest sons history concerning that time mainly focused on the civil rights movement and civil unrest, only vaguely touching on the war. Today I don’t think they even touch on it at all, though the world history seems to be a bit more in-depth than what my older kids got.
Basically, you aren’t going to learn much of use wrt history (or much else besides the basics) in high school. That’s really what college is for.
Graduated in '85. Pretty sure it wasn’t covered. I don’t recall getting past WWI, but if we did it was becoming springtime and I would have been distracted anyway.
Looking back now, it’s weird to think it had only been about a decade between our withdrawal from Vietnam, and my graduation from high school. It seems like, at the time, Vietnam was a long time ago. Ancient history like the moon walks.
I graduated high school in 2002; like many of the others here, my history classes basically consisted of a slow, methodical plod through ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, slowly building in speed as the year wore on, then beginning a desperate rush in the last few weeks, finishing up during or just after WW2, then starting over again with the Egyptians the next year. The only time Vietnam was covered in even the slightest detail was in seventh grade, and was one day, which consisted almost entirely of our teacher (who was too old to have been involved himself) vehemently telling us that “we didn’t lose; we retreated from Saigon and pulled out of the war”. Honestly baffled and (for once) not trying to be a smartass, I asked “So you’re saying that we didn’t lose because we ran away and abandoned our allies? How is that not notably worse?” and watched him turn so red that steam seemed to be coming out his ears.
As with many posters above me, I suspect the omissions were not accidental.
Appreciate the replies, although I said young Americans not you old codgers! Just joshin’. Glad it’s not just my education that fizzled out on anything after WWII…and even then, we didn’t get much beyond the home front.
I was born in 1975 and graduated hs in 1993. I believe I learned about Vietnam in the manner considered traditional at that time: I saw Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Apocalypse Now, and Born on the Fourth of July (in that order).
I didn’t know anything about the technical/strategic elements – like specific battles and what they were intended to achieve – until much later.
Wow, I had no idea the whole “running out of time” thing was so common! It happened to me, too - we’d spend forever on the colonial/revolutionary period, a good bit of time on the Civil War, then start running out of time and try to cram everything else in, but never get too far into the 20th century.
I did have one social studies teacher in 10th grade who brought up Vietnam a good bit - not because it was what we were studying, but because she was always very eager for the conversation to stray to social/political topics about which she felt strongly. She was very much against the US involvement in Vietnam.
I graduated from high school in 1998.
You know, in spite of never having learned much in school about the war in Vietnam, growing up in the '90s it still felt very much “in the air.” The question of whether or not Clinton was a draft-dodger was big news. Most people my age had parents who had been young during the war, and a lot of us seemed to have imbibed their views on the subject. I clearly remember having late-night dorm room bull sessions at the turn of the century about whether the war was justified - and it had already been over for decades at that point! I do suspect that Iraq/Afghanistan acted as proxy wars for many in my generation - having been seeped in Vietnam lore all our lives, we were ready to go when a war for “our” generation came on the scene.
This. I learned about the American Revolution probably 3 different times, with the American civil war covered somewhere in there. It was so deadly repetitive that I had little interest in learning more history until I rediscovered (and developed a keen interest in) it as an adult, reading books on my own.
I’d wager that what little Vietnam history is taught in high school mostly consists of discussions of its effect on JFK’s, LBJ’s and Nixon’s presidencies, and the divisive effect that the war had in the US. I kind of doubt there’s much discussion of the “Hearts and Minds” strategy, or anything like that.
If history has taught us anything, it’s that our current inescapable military adventures are an example of history repeating itself, which nobody knows because it isn’t covered in history class.
I went to HS in the late 1970s, so it was probably still too fresh in everyone’s minds to consider it “history”, but the only mention of it that I remember was that we were shown Hearts and Minds in class. As for college, the university I went to had a lax American history requirement; I only had to take one course, of my choice (I went with the 1770s). A few years later, they didn’t even require that, as the school felt that the three years of high school social studies required to get in was sufficient.
I’m in high school right now. We’ve learned a bit about Vietnam for a couple years in a row; the coverage has been almost entirely negative (as, I think, it should be). When we were 13 or 14, I remember spending a class or two listening to protest songs from the 60s, looking at historical photos like the monks burning themselves and the napalm girl, reading accounts of American soldiers killing civilians, etc. It seems to be framed as “America’s won EVERY SINGLE WAR - oh, except for this one. Yeah, we kinda sucked that time.”
High school class 0f '72 - Vietnam was current events, not history.
Our world (mostly European) history class, required in 9th grade, got as far as Napoleon. The US history class, required in 11th, made it as far as WW II.
Graduated 1999. The last history I remember getting out of a textbook in school is somewhere maybe just past the Great Depression. I don’t recall ever making it all the way to the atomic bomb. We certainly never got to Vietnam. I got a little bit of the civil rights movement sort of sideways, as context for a few things in literature classes, but it wasn’t much more than some video of Martin Luther King, Jr., and a lot of pictures of the crowds at protests and/or Woodstock. The only reason I know anything at all about WWII is that one of my high school friends was a military tech nut, and occasionally he explained things like how he named one of their cats after a fighter plane.
The lack of any real history in this regard, especially how we kept skipping the Cold War, made a lot of things not make a whole lot of sense when I was a kid. My parents said and did a lot of things that nowadays I think were probably motivated by a kind of fear that I didn’t have, since by the time I was aware of the world the Berlin Wall had come down, the USSR had broken up, etc. I remember being up very, very late, watching news coverage of the first Iraq War, with my parents in the living room, and realizing that was going to be in history books someday. Sometime later, I looked back on that and wondered what the hell my parents were thinking, letting me stay up late to watch news of a horrible war? And sometime after that, I realized that my parents – born at opposite ends of the 1950s, my father old enough to remember ‘duck and cover’ drills in elementary school – probably hadn’t sent me to bed because they weren’t sure anyone was going to wake up in the morning.
). From my recollection, my eldest sons history concerning that time mainly focused on the civil rights movement and civil unrest, only vaguely touching on the war. Today I don’t think they even touch on it at all, though the world history seems to be a bit more in-depth than what my older kids got.