We don’t teach history as a moral lesson at all, nor as an huge assortment of single details and facts. Instead history is taught as several causes leading up to certain events, and the impact these events had in turn. So instead of some heroic poem about a guy riding his horse (with lots of historic inaccuracies) we discuss the causes leading up to the revolutionary war - both the official PR and the real ones, maybe compare the situation in the British colonies in America with other british colonies - and then look at the results of that revolution.
Our history school books contain extracts of historic sources and graphs and similar aids to get the general picture.
We also expect a history teacher to debunk myths, not continue them, and to teach the kids that people are people and historic ideals weren’t perfect saints. Thus, we can admire Martin Luther Kings civil rights struggle and look at his stolen thesis and marital infedelities seperately (if at all, because they had minor impact on his historic achievments).
But when people use the advice about repeating history if you don’t learn from it, we take it to mean that we need to learn about the causes that motivate and influence groups of people, not year numbers or myths. Only a few dates are important as reference points on which event followed which other, what invention or development was contemoporary to what else and so on. But it’s not important to learn every member of the Continental Congress by name, or the date of each battle of the Revolutionary war, instead we should teach children about the real motivations and causes.
Knowing what causes contributed to the fall of the Weimar Republic is important to prevent another attack on democracy, for example.
As a more recent graduate than msot of you (late 80’s, early 90’s), I had a lot of good history instruction. It wasn’t particularly whitewashed or down on the US for anything. It mostly taked honestly. The only real fault was simply that history instruction build on itself every year and tended to cover the same topics. Even in High school (heck, even in college), there was no way to adequately cover everything.
The reason the Mexican-American war is not covered well is because it ultimately had only a slow, lingering impact which is difficult to pinpoint down the line. Sure, it’s described briefly, but then it must be left alone in order to cover events of huge and obvious significance.
I have noted here that many objections to schooling tended to go with “damn this childish myth”, which is OK when we’re not dealing with young children who need legends rather than facts. The other objection is “What, they didn’t cover [insert topic] enough or in the manner I want?!”
Loewen, for example, is a fool. He’s a smart man - and he wrote a good book. Unfortunately, his book is also filled with half-truths and biases, very often worse than the simplified versions of the books he condemns. He himself would have put in just as many errors, and he would have taken vastly too long to do it.
Now, I myself favor more intensive “area” classes, which would look at particular nations or periods of history, and from a relatively early age (perhaps the sixth grade onward). Kinds could learn a bit better how things interacted in history, and who the important figures were, in more detail.
Although the nature of that naval war meant that the Japanese ground and air forces couldn’t be used effectively in any case. The island fortresses were crammed to the gills with Japanese soldiers. It didn’t help.
My experience with American History (I graduated from HS about a year ago) seemed to be “flood them with idealism while they’re young and then meticulously trash it over the coming years.”
My AP US History class was good though. For one thing, it’s always taught by two teachers, often two that have opposing viewpoints on various issues (though not all, iirc both of mine were Democrats, but they differed a lot on presidential effectiveness and such). For our papers for various areas of history we always had to read anywhere from two to five different historians with conflicting viewpoints and synthesize opinions based on the textbook, lectures, and their analysis to form our opinions on various policies or time periods in a paper. And various “Warts” (ESPECIALLY pre-Revolution, since they figured some number of us were pretty indoctrinated by that point) weren’t glossed over, they especially loved railing on that entire taxation issue and us being needless whiners over it (though did, conversely, recognize GB’s flaws in the matter as well).
We didn’t have to learn dates (and, in fact, on the AP Exam a lot of times the Free Response and Document Based Questions would provide them), but were recommended to know around when things happened, and encouraged (but not required) to memorize the years each president served to help with piecing together chains of events for essays (“hey, this happened around then, maybe this has something to do with it!”).
I should point out that this was a political history class though, I couldn’t tell you the first damn thing about the battles of the Civil War, but I could probably muster together the political conflicts of various powers inside and outside the US had over the issue at the time. We were even told apocryphal stories about the times (noted as such) and told how the stories came about and how they affected (and were effected by) the political landscape at the time.
To be fair, back in '05 or '06 my school was ranked #1 by the College Board in terms of US History, US Government and (I think) English so my school is maybe (just maybe) an outlier here…