Well, I also had the same experience in high school. College finally took it further, but it took a while. I wondered if that’s common, so here’s a poll.
In US History, we did a very poor job of learning from ~1700-~2001 in America.
I picked no, but then realized there was that whole unit on The Constitution, with a test we had to pass to graduate. Still, not really “history” as such, although it was taught in our Social Studies classes - which were what we called History classes. It was information on how a bill is passed, how many Senators and Representatives our state had and that sort of junk, not history per se.
We got up to the Civil War about every year and then started back at the Pilgrims the next.
We did but not as much as I wanted to. I now have a degree in history.
I don’t really remember but I don’t think so. I remember the American history class in prep for our required government “citizenship test” (do schools still do this?), and I remember doing a lot on current events, but 1900-1980 not so much.
Most of my history classes stopped around WWI. In my senior year we did touch on a few modern things, and here is what I learned:
Unions had some strikes, and Sally Fields was involved.
The Vietnam War happened: punji stakes, elephant grass, and a scary photo.
Most of what I knew about Vietnam came from old Doonesbury comics until I was out of college.
I want to say we made it to ~WW II in U.S. history, but I won’t swear to it. But being a history geek even back then I also took an alternative elective, some sort of World History 2 ( this was awhile ago, I don’t recall the title ), so I got more history coverage than was average for my school.
We covered it up to and including WWII.
I picked yes, but we usually didn’t get much further than the Cold War when the year ran out. However, my teacher was a Vietnam vet, so we did have occasional days during the school when we’d take a side trip that day and cover information on the Vietnam war and the era of the 1960s.
We studied up through around Watergate. I graduated in 1986. I’d say we learned it, but not thoroughly. I’m conversant, not fluent.
We rushed through the Civil War. Now that I live south of the Mason Dixon I’ve found that here they power through the American Revolution and have memorized the dates and locations of all the major Civil War battles.
I chose AP European. My friends who took AP American might have a different answer.
In my high school US history class, we made it all the way to the civil rights movement, but it was a bit of a sprint to get it all in. We still got bogged down in the Civil War – I didn’t have a history class that didn’t get bogged down in the Civil War until college – but the teacher made sure to leave enough room to at least touch on Vietnam and civil rights before the end of the semester. It wasn’t especially in depth, being that it was a whirlwind of fitting in everything post-WWII over the course of like 3 days, but better than nothing.
We did at least spend a fair amount of time on both world wars, which was nice. My previous history classes hadn’t really bothered with it much (especially WWI) beyond a few dates.
I graduated in 1977. I think we went through the Vietnam War, but I don’t remember anymore.
We covered recent history extensively in my high school. I think I was a junior when we did a class focused entirely on contemporary history from like WWII up to the 1980s (including things like watching the Kennedy assassination and All the President’s Men in class, having some Vietnam vets come in to talk to the class about what it was like and their dislike of Jane Fonda, etc.) Then in the civics class as seniors we would discuss contemporary politics in the context of how the government functions (I remember talking about the 1992 election and such).
If this is abnormal, it could explain a lot about the rampant stupidity that I’ve seen expressed in comments on current events news stories on Yahoo. :dubious:
Despite all of 8th grade history being about the civil war, we went over it yet again in high school, so we barely made it past 1900. 7th grade was devoted to WII, which is the only part of the 20th century we covered in depth in grades 1-12. Other than WWII virtually everything I know about the history of the 20th century (including all I know about WWI) has come from reading outside of school/after high school.
In my high school American history class we spent an absurd amount of time on colonial America. Two months talking about the founding of the colonies and early colonial life. A month talking about the heating tensions between the colonies and England. Another two months talking about the revolutionary war. We started running out of time during the Civil War. The history books themselves went all the way to the most recent Iraq War but we didn’t make it close to that.
I graduated in '84; I didn’t like school and didn’t really pay much attention, (everything I know about history I learned from John Jakes) but it seemed like we spent tons of time on boring dates and battles from a long time ago, then when we finally reached the 20th century and I was actually interested, it was spring and nearly the end of the year. We got as far as the flapper era; the last few days of school I remember a vocabulary sheet of 20s slang with words like “gams” (female legs) and “heater” (gun).
In World Civ, which I took in ninth grade, we ran out of time and only spent a few days on the 20th century. In American history, which I took in tenth grade, we spent a decent amount of time on the twentieth century and covered through the Vietnam War and Watergate, but nothing after that. So I got some 20th century coverage but not a lot, with one exception.
The exception was the Holocaust. We covered this not only in every history class I ever took but also in every English class I ever took, and in German, and briefly in several other subjects.
I know we had a pretty detailed unit on Vietnam, but I’m pretty sure we did it out of chronological order (both history classes in high school generally went in order).
I’m wondering if the real reason that contemporary history might be neglected in many school districts is because they are trying to avoid “controversy”?
Nowadays the majority of people no longer have strong feelings about the Civil War (I know there are exceptions), but there are still people with strong feelings about more recent events like Vietnam or 9/11 that could get riled up depending on how the teachers were framing the issue.
I honestly think it is just time constraints. If those weren’t there, then what you speculate about might be an issue, but the problem is history keeps getting longer and the school year does not ;). Combine that with the heavy emphasis ( for sound enough reasons ) on the founding on the U.S. and the trauma of the Civil War and American history classes really have to sprint to get even a superficial exposure of the 20th century. And world history courses are in even worse shape by multiple orders of magnitude.
But let’s take a moment to pity the poor U.S. history HS students in 1790, who would have had to spend a month studying the election platform of Robert Harrison :D.