Out of all the many problems with American Public Schools, one is probably a bit more of an issue then most of the others.
It’s not teacher pay (which is abysmal, pay your teachers!) and it’s not the woefully large number of school shootings that happen pretty much every day (the solution is gun reform not more guns IMO)- it’s how unbearably Eurocentric our history classes are.
And even then, it’s incredibly biased.
From basically day one you learn the same thing, the Colonial period with the “kind Indians,” the Revolutionary War, Slavery and the Civil War, then there’s usually a skip up to WW1 to WW2.
That’s it.
Unless you take a college level (AP) class or an elective you probably aren’t going to learn about African cultures and history (I didn’t until my sophomore literature class when we read "Things Fall Apart") or Asian culture and history (except the information necessary to describe the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ).
Not to mention the Middle East? That place we’ve been bombing for over a decade? Definitely not.
How are Americans supposed to truly understand the world around them, not to mention the politics and economics involved, if they don’t know history? And they can’t just know American and European history. That’s simply not enough. I understand teachers only have a limited amount of time and that they have to go over whatever the state tells them to but, seriously, guys. Americans are constantly being laughed at for this- and like I said- it’s a big issue. One reason why is that by only showing American and European history, its seriously skewing students perspectives. American students think the US is always the hero- think Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s "Team America: World Police."
I would be remiss to not mention that there are a lot of holes in the American and European history we’re taught too. (I do realize some of these things shouldn’t be taught to like elementary age kids but holding out till the last two years of high school is a bit much). I’m talking about the fact that it wasn’t just Jews who were slaughtered in the Holocaust but the Romani, members of the LGBT community, political rivals, mentally disabled people, and more. I’m also talking about the utterly horrific things the white American government has been and continues to do to our Native American population. Or that Hitler/the Nazi Party got a lot of inspiration on their ideas on Eugenics from the U.S.
I understand that this is very hard stuff. But this isn’t even scratching the surface of what we don’t teach our kids. This is just one history student’s opinion. When it comes to other stuff, the sciences, math- how to do our taxes? Someone more knowledgeable on those topics is gonna have to speak up because I’ve got no doubt they are just as woefully inadequate as the historical topics taught in our public schools.
