Growing up, I remember taking a lot of history classes. 4th grade we had state history (California), at least 2 US history classes in junior high/middle school, and 2-3 more in high school. People are still dunces about US history but I figure it’s due to lack of interest.
What’s the word on this? Did the curriculum in California schools during the 80s and 90s have too much history?
I think this will do better in IMHO.
twickster, MPSIMS moderator, who managed to get through HS and college without a single US History course
Well remember what Ambraham Lincoln said when be signed the declaration of independance, the only thing to fear is a big stick.
Consider yourself lucky-growing up in TX I had freaking Texas history every year through 8th grade. Talk about useless history lessons! I love history and I minored in it in college but I know more about Texas than I could ever possibly need to know.
Well, if Jay Leno’s history quizzes mean anything, I would like quite a few Californians know squat about history.
Texas history? Chapters 1-19: Secession attempts 1-19.
Grades 4, 5, 8, 10, 11.
Not nearly enough if you ask me.
Too much US History? I don’t think so. However, I do think there is too much emphasis on the Civil War. Every US History class spent several weeks on a 4 year period in our history (yes, an important 4 year period) to the detriment of more recent history. I can only remember once making it past 1900 (other than a last day of class "Here’s the last 100+ years of history condensed into a 20 minute lecture).
I think learning about WWI, the great depression, WWII, Korea, Vietnam (along with all the social issues therein) are equally important as the Civil War…but that’s just me I guess.
When I started college, a counselor asked what kind of history I liked. When said US History, he asked why. I said because there’s much less of it.
No, I think too little US history is taught actually.
This, plus I took AP history in 12th grade and took US history again in college.
Not once did I learn about anything after Vietnam.
History only goes up to Vietnam. Nothing happened after. Ever. Just ask your parents.
We need to keep increasing the amount we teach, because we keep making more of it.
I don’t think that too much or too little is taught so much as that the emphasis should be on examining very specific items of interest to the teacher–maybe some new area of history to the teacher each year.
Any representative selection of history is equally as useful as any other portion. But knowing practically nothing about everything is meaningless. Trying to cover it all is a fool’s game. But more importantly, the purpose of teaching is moreso to get kids thinking critically, and learning about the pluses and minuses of human interactions on a large scale. To do that, you really need to delve into analyzing stuff. Memorizing history is as useful as memorizing the serial codes of every item you have in your pantry. You need to play with it in your own hands, take it apart and try to put it together, before it becomes something useful.
American history isn’t any better or worse than anything else for that. The teacher should be allowed to use whatever course through time and location as makes sense to him, so long as it’s not terribly propagandic.
If it happened during my lifetime, then it isn’t history. No how, no way. History stops with Eisenhower!
My Dad on the Vietnam War:
“When I was your age, it wasn’t history, it was news.”
I can’t speak for the US since I don’t live there, but I grew up in NZ and we covered NZ History all the way through primary school and High School.
The problem is that New Zealand’s recorded History begins in the early 1800s and has been comparatively uneventful, save for the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, the Musket Wars (when the Maori first acquired firearms and started shooting each other with them), The Maori Wars (AKA The Land Wars, The New Zealand Wars, and several other revisionist titles du jour) of the 1840s-1860s (the British won), and then nothing of general interest until 1893 (Women get the vote), then Gallipoli, then nothing until World War II, then nothing of general interest after that excepting things like Sir Edmund Hilary climbing Everest.
At leas the US has a long and interesting history to study, in other words.
My son just started 7th grade and hasn’t been taught anywhere close to the amount of U.S. (or any) History that my sister and I had.
Sometimes I think that means they’re not teaching enough, and then I reflect on how often I’ve had to draw on my knowledge of battles in the American Revolution, or the Teapot Dome scandal.
Be grateful you don’t live in Australia. All we’ve got are convicts, explorers and bush rangers. Not very patriotic of me, I know, but I much prefer world history.
LOL at Mr Enfield Snr. He must be about my vintage.
American history was always my least favorite kind of history, mostly because it’s full of a lot of really dry political stuff, endless laws and bills and acts. I always preferred European history much more; the longer time span of European history allows it to be taught with more emphasis on broader overarching concepts, and of course the diversity of the cultures of different nations of Europe was always far more interesting to me than the difference between the North and the South or whatever. (This is why it galls me that there could be a room with a Polish-American, a German-American, an Italian-American, a Greek-American, an Irish-American and an English-American and it still wouldn’t be considered “diverse” by today’s standards because all the people would be white.)
I think there is not enough history in general taught in high school, definitely. But of that history which is taught, too much of it is American history and not enough of it is European. Sometimes I ask people just for the hell of it if they can name and briefly describe three English kings. Most of them are unable to.
Probably too much US history in comparison to human history. I think a country has to be examined in the context of the rest of the world. I probably knew more about 18th century England, France and Spain than I did about their 20th century incarnations. It seemed that once America took root, the rest of the world became a sideshow at best, in our history classes.