There are certainly quite a lot of people, Lynne Cheney among them when she was chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, who hate that schoolchildren are now taught about the unsavory aspects of American history and quite a bit about American outgroups like slaves, immigrants (not the sanitized kind) and Native Americans, for that very reason. Which is of course revolting and despicable, and in fact I hate her more than her husband. (Lesbian historical romance novel notwithstanding.)
That’s not really a fair comparison, considering we were still actively engaged in a war in 1968, while West Germany (I assume that’s where the student was from) had had more than 20 years to come to terms with their past.
I can assure you that in my public school days in Orange County, history teachers weren’t shy about the facts that (1) we shouldn’t have been in Vietnam, and (2) we lost, and that was less than 10 years after the end of the conflict. (Don’t tell anyone.)
We also learned about how the European-Americans slaughtered the native peoples, stole the southwest from Mexico, and managed to start and lose a war with Canada, and that most of the founding fathers were hypocritical slave-owning aristocrats.
Lincoln was a pretty good guy though.
Indeed, any time I hear or see people discussing how the public school system whitewashes history, I think either they don’t remember what they actually learned in school or I went to some very exceptional schools.
In fact, it was largely outside of school that I learned that maybe the United States wasn’t exceptionally bad. E.g., the Indians weren’t always innocent, passive victims in every conflict or conscientious stewards of the environment. If we stole the northeast, Spain stole the southwest and France stole Louisiana, n’est-ce pas? If the country was built on slavery, it’s because the institution already existed in Europe, etc.
Based on the conversation I reported here, I’d say that German students, even at the university level, are not taught too much detail about the war. I could speculate and suggest that, in addition to the normal unwillingness to dwell on loss and horror, showing too much interest in the details of the Nazi period could be regarded as unseemly?
For example, using an only slightly less controversial historical past: imagine what if US Civil War re-enactors brought along a whip-cracking plantation overseer re-enactor for “extra realism?” It would leave a bad taste in people’s mouths at the very least. Maybe Germans just regard it as nasty to dwell on the details.
That was certainly true when I was a kid, but I think not so much now. School curricula have changed–and of course states have quite a bit of control over everything past the basics. My kids were taught that we* did horrible and shameful things, ranging from the Indian wars to the Japanese internment camps in WWII; from President Jefferson owning slaves to recent-day racism in the South. In some cases, the pendulum seems to have swung from “we’re always right” to “we’re always wrong.” Hopefully, we’ll find a nice balance in between and just present the facts from both sides.
- This “we” thing bothers me. They try to make kids feel guilty for what other people did, as if they were somehow responsible. First, I don’t believe in making children responsible for the sins of their parents. Second, my family wasn’t even in this country during the slave era or Indian wars.
Generational difference, I imagine.
That’s not education, that’d be propaganda. Scary.
Fair cop. I think American children were pretty heavily propagandized during the Cold War, so our perspective may be a bit skewed from that.
Loving the U.S., loving freedom, and feeling guilty about being white (and to an extent - male) are all staples of the American educational system.
I could buy that if the claims were only made by people in their 50s and older, but they aren’t. In many cases it’s people younger than I exclaiming “Why don’t they teach this in school!?”
Not all of us, at least not in school. Yeah, I was exposed to a lot of “America: Love It or Leave It” and “My Country Right or Wrong,” but not from history teachers. Now I realize my experiences weren’t universal, but I can’t help but think that they weren’t unique either, and some people simply don’t remember what they learned in history. I don’t remember how to calculate the hypotenuse of a right triangle, but I don’t think there was any conspiracy to conceal the truth about trigonometry from me. Yet many people seem to assume that if they don’t recall a historical fact, they weren’t taught it. I think people also have a tendency to exaggerate the degree to which they are responsible for their own education and beliefs. It’s nicer sometimes to suppose we know what we know and think what we think because of our own intellectual vigor and insight than to really consider how much of our knowledge and beliefs were handed down to us.
We had a German exchange student my senior year (2002/03) and she was uncomfortable with things like the Pledge of Allegiance (though it was made clear to her that she was not expected to participate), “Patriot Fridays”, all the American flag pins, and a bunch of other post 9/11 stuff. Nothing like any of that existed in Germany and her only reference point for stuff like that was the Nazis. According to her any “patriotism” Germans express is for their local town or region, not Germany as a whole. She never saw the German flag flown anywhere other than a federal government building. The daily Pledge really freaked her out.
Also despite coming from a country with universal male conscription thought it was extremely bizarre how often military recruiters visited our school and even sponsered assemblies that all students had to go to. This was unheard of in German. And it’s a bit of hijack, but she was also very confused as to why nobody used the “modern showers” the school provided after gym class. She unwitingly tried to take a shower after her first gym class and the other girls freaked out and stopped her.
I understand Germans have gotten a bit more comfortable with some of the more cosmetic aspects of nationalism (flags and such) via football.
Yes, that’s certainly part of it.
The relationship Germany has with this page of its history is amusingly schyzophrenic in that regards : on the one hand, they make double doggy sure every single kid knows that at one time, Germans were extremely bad, and that modern Germans must still make amends for it. The sheer amount of Nazi guilt among modern Germans is surprising, considering neither they nor their parents had anything to do with it. I think it’s starting to ease off a bit, but still. German kids will not be spared the school trip to a concentration camp any time soon.
But on the other hand, everything even remotely Nazi-related is strenglisch verboten in the country. Holocaust denial, war memorabilia, even images of the swastika-on-red are simply taboo. WW2 war movies or games from the German perspective are rare, and those that do exist tend to be dark affairs where depressed and hopeless anti-heroes futilely struggle against their own Nazi masters rather than, you know, the Allies - despite the fact that Allied atrocities are far from unheard of, as are honest to God German war heroes.
But Germany will seemingly never ever let itself say “we weren’t all that bad” - presumably because they fear it’d be the beginning of a slippery slope right back into “Hitler had the right idea !”. Or maybe they fear the rest of the world would pounce on them for the same reason, I dunno.
FWIW, I’m French and all of this freaks me out all just the same 
I don’t quite understand this comment… what is a “modern shower” (or what did she think was one)?
There is regional variation as well. Are you familiar with the controversy in Texas? (New history textbooks adopted, with a very conservative slant.)
/hijack
Good. It must never happen again.
That is because they were.
Not here it isn’t; you probably loose your job if you tried that approach.
In England, where they invented Jingoism? I am impressed!
What? That’s not “educational” or “teaching”, it’s the opposite. You’re talking about indoctrination. I think we generally look down on that.
I agree, but I think that I was certainly indoctrinated in elementary school in the 1960’s.
Maybe it’s generational. I was in elementary school mid to late 70’s (post Vietnam and Watergate). I remember learning that our country was founded by rebels, and that our government may not always be right. However, we have the great freedom of dissent. It was fairly anti-authoritarian, which seemed a far cry from what Captain was talking about above.