What did you learn in school about history and politics? - Polidicks

With people from all over the world on FP, I thought it would be interesting to compare what our schools taught us about history and politics. Was it comprehensive or was big stuff missing? Was it balanced or did they shove views down your throat? Would the average person get an understanding of the basics of how politics works? There's a fair amount of variation within the UK about what topics different schools cover, and even in the fairly short time since I finished school there have been major changes to the system in England. Up to age 14 you study all sorts of stuff from ancient history through the Romans and the Vikings and Henry VIII's wives and stuff. At age 14 or so you get to choose what subjects you wanna study, one of mine was History and that's when -- imo -- the good shit began. For the first year of GCSE we studied Medicine Through Time which started with dudes in the stone age rubbing two leaves together and ended with the establishment of the NHS. It was pretty good although I've forgotten a fair bit of it because it's not something I'm super interested in. For second year we studied the Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazi Germany. This was really cool and I still remember a lot of stuff from it. My teacher was pretty clear he intended it as a cautionary tale, I remember him bringing up the Dutch PVV as evidence that fascism is still out there and we need to wary of it. He was one of my favourite teachers. Then at age 16 you could either leave school or do two years of A-Levels. I did History, and would have done Government and Politics too except it clashed with another of my classes. I think they did one year of UK politics and one year of US politics (2012 election was ongoing at this point). People knew I was interested in politics so I was the only non-Politics student invited to come to school overnight to watch the 2012 election results: https://youtu.be/1ATZhHnkbyo Can't actually remember the full timeline of A-Level History but I know we did Liberal Britain which covered the rise of the welfare state, women's suffrage and other liberal causes in the late 19th/early 20th century, which was really interesting. And we also did Tsarist Russia 1855-1917, ending with the October Revolution and the death of the Tsars. This was cool too although a lot of it kind of blurs together when I think back on it. We also studied the US civil rights movement, I remember watching Malcolm X to reference it in an essay or something. I think the teaching style didn't work for me on that one cus I was kind of bored by it even though the subject matter is amazing. In terms of things missing, I don't think there was much if any political education for people who didn't take Government and Politics at age 16 (a very small subset of people). Imo the basics of politics should be taught at a much younger age and built upon throughout the years. Everyone should understand the basics of how government works. The coolest thing that did happen was that when the general election was called in 2010, the school decided to organise a parallel school election where we elected a school rep or something, and anyone could run for this position and declare a party affiliation or go independent. But the position they'd made up was so ill-defined that a protest movement convinced half the school, including me, to vote for a bagel as a write-in candidate. The bagel votes were excluded from the official result tally (which I now think was a missed opportunity, they could have highlighted the ineffectiveness of protest voting or something) and we officially elected someone affiliated to the extremely fringe Socialist Labour Party. So I guess when it comes down to it, I went to a radical leftist school lmao. The position was never mentioned again anyway, AFAIK it was basically just a stunt to teach us about politics but it was pretty cool. What did you learn about history, government, and politics in school?

It's hard for me to know what school taught me sometimes as I have always been a big reader, and a big consumer of history books, both fiction and non fiction so there's quite a few subjects I know about, that I associate with School, but I can't say for certain I learned from school directly. Canadian history classes dealt with; American history, american political history, american political divisions, current events in canada and america, the treatment of natives, the division of the Metis, the history around the founding of Canada, the history of Canada in the 1900's, WW1, WW2, Korean War, Vietnam. We learned about some aspects of Russia, and the USSR and their history, but not as much. This is where things start to really get hard to follow for me, because I was a reader, my teachers would often just ask me "hey, do you have interest in reading this book?" and I'd almost always end up reading something from their personal collection. For instance I knew more about the soviet gulags, and soviet culture in general, due to having read "The Gulag Archipelago" by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, but when I try and remember what specially was taught in class, versus what books like that often taught me, i'd be hard pressed to say I recall for sure. We missed a huge, HUGE chunk of global history, but we had minor "overviews" of just about every time period in classical history. It's just that it was done at a speed, and at a pace that really wasn't designed for thoughtful learning.

I learned that I should do my own research.

US history, Revolutionary War, Civil War etc. The presidents, the Supreme Court that sort of thing. English and French history, some Asian and other European. World Wars as well as theology.

I learned fuckall. Everything I know is from my own research because I live in one of the lowest ranked states for education in the US.

I just remember learning some basics about the swedish parliament system and that democracy is important and stuff.

I learned enough to notice how it tends to repeat itself and we cannot learn for shit.

At primary and highschool we learned about the basics - Human evolution, the formation of societies, technological and scientific development etc Tribalism, feudalism, industrialization etc dabbling into every European century after the 10th, including fairly detailed rundowns of both world wars. Also dabbling in early Russian history, with more focus on the time after the October Revolution Estonian history as a focus, especially in the context of Russian history, as they are our biggest cultural influence by far. We had religious studies class where we were taught about every major religion in a secular manner. Very basic courses on American history. Fairly in depth looks at different forms of government which actually existed. Most of my knowledge and understanding in general came from Cultural Studies class in University (The name is somewhat misleading, it could be considered a critical reading and thinking class) which basically formed my entire core in how to approach epistemic issues - Question everything and validate everything, everything is tentative. At this point is where I started reading for fun, and not just out of necessity, but because here I learned how good it feels to be wrong - and then be corrected. Several years later here we be

I learned that the Canadian government was willing to feed youngsters bullshit. In I think 2004, maybe 2003, around when the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were getting a lot more news coverage. We were told Canada was in Afghanistan as "peacekeepers" not as "peacemakers". We were shown a photo of one of our guys wearing a green uniform and a desert vest standing next to a German soldier wearing a full desert uniform in Afghanistan. The guy talking was like "Notice how our guy doesn't wear proper camoflauge. Thats because his goal is not to kill the enemy unlike the German soldier on the right" and yea thats probably total bullshit if the constant "CANADIAN DIES FIGHTING IN AFGHANISTAN" news articles for the next near decade had anything to say about it. Other than that, I got to see the effects of protests and demonstrations against the government first hand! Some dude was streaking with his pals in high school and got tackled by the school cop, so this growing crowd of I'd say eventually 100 people including me started shouting "FREE DANIEL!" or whatever his name was and eventually the cop just let the guy go but he still had no clothes lol. fight the powah bitches

My pre-GCSE experience was very similar: Romans, Tudors, Victorians, etc. GCSE History was focused on WW1 in the first year and the Cold War in the second year. My teacher was pretty great and I think his lessons went a long way towards getting me really interested in 20th century events and modern geopolitics.

Wtf, was this a teacher saying this stuff or what?

i learned that authoritarianism, racism, misogyny, and homophobia are all destructive and do unnecessary harm to people that don't deserve it. but it was worded like they were things of the past

While it mostly had to do with my country's history and their (repeating) economical mistakes from the moment it became indepentant up to recent european years,it also explained stuff happening around the world from 1918 up to the end of the cold war,with some chapters about stuff like the korean and vietnam wars,notes about speaks from various leaders. But generaly i learned that relations between countries tend to change a lot in history.

iirc grades 1-3, maybe 1-4 were assembled in the school gym for a presentation about the war in Afghanistan by some military representative. The school held grades 1-6 though so I guess maybe they figured the slightly older kids weren't gonna buy it or something.

My US history teachers in my private school, especially highschool took a 'hold no punches' approach so we were taught and told about how fucking brutal the Americans were against the Native Americans.

I don't remember much about history classes from before the age of 15. After that though (if you pick history as a class you want to follow of course), you learn a lot about context and why things happened. They explain this through 'examples', so to, for example, explain industrialization, new imperialism, nationalism etc, they zoom in on Germany from the 19th century until the 2nd world war. Our parliamentary system, what a welfare state is and what ours looks like, political ideologies and how Dutch society changed in the post-war years is taught in social studies class. The teacher I had for social studies was great. I remember that he showed us Sicko by Michael Moore. The part where that guy had to pick which finger he wanted to have reattached to his hand because he couldn't afford to keep both really stuck with me.

Absolutely fuck all. We learned that other cultures exist in middle school with no follow up in highschool other than American politics classes which taught us names and dates but no motives or reason. The rest was the monthly paper that sucks the cock of the founding fathers and about how the civil war was about states rights when it very clearly isn't. "the industrial revolution was a thing" was about the best we got on the subject. Everything else I had to learn on my own because no school would dare talk about the Islamic golden age, crusades, opium wars, robber barons or how how little Portugal changed the world because that would involve talking about politics and if there's one thing U.S. schools really don't want nor are incentivized to teach you, It is politics and economics. I had one teacher that went into the 20th century politics/economics and he was an amazing orator but he was a small boat in a sea of piss.

My school experience was similar to smurfys. Up to about the age of 14 you learned history in a general sort of way. We didn't learn any of the finer details beyond what the teacher shared from their own knowledge (which they often did). We did get a fairly glorified view of the British Empire as this "big and great thing which brought civilisation to the tribal parts of the world!!!!" leaving out the horrible massacres and other not-so-nice-parts, which we learned in GSCE History. Funnily enough we also did Medicine Through Time and Weimar Germany, but we also did World War 1 and (ugh) History of Travel & Tourism, which was pretty boring, but we did that first so we could do the others later. We had some pretty cool field trips in history, though they've all but eradicated that from my old school now. One such trip was to Berlin, where we also got a very crash course intro to the Cold War. We had tours around the stadium there, and the old Nazi parade ground was still fenced off, but just sat ominously in the distance. We did have a trip to Sachsenhausen, and it was one of the most emotional and harrowing trips I've ever been on. I honestly think that kids should visit one of the old Nazi death camps, the feeling is indescribable, but I learned a lot. In college, I chose medieval history for my A-Level, where we did the Tudors but in much more detail, the Witch Hunts in Europe, and the Golden Age of Spain, all of which introduced us to bias, citing sources and so on. We also had some good trips as well, although I missed out on the Spanish trip due to being on holiday myself at the time. We did go to Leeds Royal Armoury where we had a special seminar in which I got to wear a full suit of plate armour. While medieval history was cool, my counterparts doing modern history got to look at the Cold War. At the time, I wasn't interested in that time period but recently it's something I've been reading a lot about, so in hindsight I would've liked to have done that. I didn't do history at university. Overall, I think I've been very, very fortunate with my history teachers, as they all taught history properly, namely, identifying bias within a source and approaching it appropriately. None of them ever tried to push a certain view (except maybe the whole British Empire, but that was one teacher out of many.). Even in GSCE History, we learned about how the Nazis were, for all their evil actions, just humans, and the people who supported them, just humans, not some evil demons that crawled forth to spread death and destruction. What I think really, really helps with teaching history is field trips. I feel that, without them, kids just see these as "things wot happened in a book." You don't get an appreciation for the scale of these events in history if you don't go to the places where they took place. Going to old battlefields really takes your breath away when you take in the sheer enormity of them, and read the stories of people from those times. Sadly, with the government absolutely slashing education funding, any and all history trips are done with the contribution of children's parents, and with wages as low as they are, it's no wonder that fewer and fewer kids are going on these educational trips ...

Due to memory problems I don't remember much of school, but one thing I do remember that always bothered me was how Elementary School teaches you that Columbus discovered America and disproved that the world is flat, then in Middle School you go learn that's all bullshit and he was looking for an alternative route to India so Spain could have a leg-up in trade. I don't know if they still do that, but they did when I went and it seems silly. I can kind of understand it, a child has no interest in global economics and it's not very romantic to say "he found it by accident" but it doesn't seem right to teach fairy tales as fact and then correct it later. Other than that my school was pretty competent at teaching History as far as I can remember, there are a lot of dark spots on our nations history that aren't taught like kidnapping and sterilization of indians or the systemic oppression that forced the creation of black ghettos and resulting gang violence, but there are a lot that are such as the trail of tears and how colonists and early Americans were borderline genocidal assholes. As for Politics there was a Government class but I can't remember a single thing about it or if I even took part. Overall it seemed pretty balanced, especially in High School. Never felt like I was being preached to from a right or left point of view, just what happened and how it worked out. That's especially good coming from a small town in the countryside, those apparently don't score well in most places.

Was told that france lost ww2 due to their "best genetic material dying in trenches" Was told global warming was a globalist conspiracy and that the "liberal media" was lying about christopher columbus and global warming. Also apparently American revolution was the only signifigant event of the 1800s. Yes these are all real things I am currently being told in HS. Teacher has giant dont tread on me flag lol I actually have trouble not getting unreasonably angry.

I got taught a mixed bag of interesting and dreadfully boring stuff. The Norman Conquest, Industrialization and the birth of the Soviet Union were interesting topics. Learning about stuff like Thomas Beckett's murder? Not so much. The worst thing though was easily that the fact that I was taught about Henry VIII's reign at three separate times during my time at school. Twice before GCSE and then for a whole year at A-Level. I still find the topic incredibly boring, and I''m sure that its not just because It came up so much. There is nothing a kid is going to find interesting about the religious/dynastic/relationship problems of a monarch in the middle of English history, when you don't know the before or after that well. Learning about why the Church of England exists is not relevant or important knowledge for kids to learn in 2018. I wasn't taught nearly enough about why the international system is the way it is because of the events of the 20th century. I know someone who went to the same school at me who at the time of the Brexit referendum was ranting about how the deaths of British soldiers in WW1 justify Brexit because he thought it was all a big romantic national sacrifice to defend Britain's independence. As far as political education goes in this country, its garbage. It really is. You get social progres topics like the civil rights movement and the women's rights struggle, which is good and necessary. You get to choose politics at A-Level. But otherwise, its bad. I think generally most people only get a very thin explanation of Nazism/Communism in the context of the rise of Hitler/Stalin to power. There's no meaningful teaching of political science before A-Level.

I went to HS in Alabama, by that it means we're going to have a fairly red-aligned amount of students and teachers, however I often found their way of teaching politics and being unbiased was pretty good. All my history teachers who at times doubled as civics teachers never tried to promote one ideal over another, save for one who was a little more obvious in his opinions to compared to the others. Our actual government teacher believe or not, registered us to vote once we turned 18, with our permission of course because she wanted us to be involved in the process. Even better is that she at many times tried to use unbiased sourced of news to try and promote thinking outside the box. History wise we had great teachers who seemed to love their work, often had fun little side conversations about history, though prone to give "video quizzes" when they were having a slow day. I loved history and politics to a big extent because Math bored me and I never grasped it fully,English was fairly easy for me to bullshit my way through some how, and sciences were fun and engaging. Though I never got told to stop answering questions during government or history classes. For me I grew up with parents that actively never tried to push politics on me and allowed me to make my own decisions, which lead me to be a fairly moderate liberal person. I was probably the most loud and obivious about my political leanings at my high school. A lot of times when ever we managed to get into politics in dicussions I often asked people to use credible news sources such as CNN or BBC and not MSNBC or Fox News because they were heavily biased. Of course even the better students were really stuck in their upbringing of be super-red Bible thumping yokels at times.

AP United States History and AP US Government are the big 10th/11th/12th year things here. "AP" means you get to pay to take a ranked test that might/might not mean anything to colleges. Corporate testing, the American way. The SAT is run by the same "non-profit"... So yeah, the AP Curriculum pretty much decides what you learn. If it's not an AP class, you're probably still using an AP textbook.

My former history teacher once did a discussion in class when we got to the topic of WW2 where we were tasked with the hypothetical question of "If you had to do it, how would you best dispose of the jews". After the discussion, the teacher pointed out how nobody seemed to have any qualms debating the issue, and just how easily people will go along with discussing a horrible idea if it's not seen as earnest and purely hypothetical. Then he went on to state that this is exactly how ideas like these start to develop -- it starts as something nobody takes seriously, and step by step it is taken further until people are radicalized enough to put these ideas into action. In regards to recent events, I think his words had a lot of truth to them.

Gotta agree I feel like a lot of time is spent on shit that happened hundreds of years ago, probably because it's safer/less controversial/more romanticised, and not much time is spent on modern history and stuff that really impacts the way the world works today

Sort of surprised how abroad the focus seems to be on recent history, my experience (sadly) has been the complete opposite. In high school, it basically worked like the following (my advanced level subjects in year 11-12 were history and maths): Foundational topics in 7th grade (can't really recall others than heraldry and vexillology...) International history from pre-history to roughly the 19th century in great detail (obviously big focus on Ancient Rome and Greece, and later Europe in general, but I'd say East Asia, India, Middle East and the Americas were pretty much covered adequately too, major religions were also discussed in depth so that's nice). Bit too much focus on events during the Renaissance. Hungarian history from its beginnings to early 1900s in great detail (you wouldn't believe how much time we spent on the Hungarian middle ages, holy shit) And that"s where time basically run out, so WW1, interwar period, and WW2 were quite rushed (both with local and international history). Virtually nothing on the Cold War, later conflicts like the Gulf War or Balkans. Hungary was sort of discussed until the 1956 revolution, practically nothing after that. Virtually no state theory, or political theory, very little on political ideologies. The EU was sort of discussed during Geography class, but that's it. And even if you have a great teacher (like I had luckily), he/she will be still powerless to change this structure radically. Because then you'd be boned on the national final exam (where you need to know the Hungarian middle ages in excruciating detail).

As someone who went through GCSE History (WW1 + the rise of the Nazi Party), I'm surprised that school barely taught me any history of the last century or so. I got disjointed bits of history about niche topics, strung out with no personal grasp of how distant each of these events were, and nothing solid regarding where I we are now in the world and how. I know I have the benefit of being out of school as I say this, but I'd believe that a crash course on modern history & international politics leading up to the modern day would be beneficial. We can easily trace back a whole bunch of things which effect us today simply back to the outcome of WW1, and it's a shame how such a breadth of useful & relevant history is effectively hidden. Hell, I learnt more about what happened in the last century more in a few years out of school than my entire time in it.

I was in a charter school in the US. We were taught comprehensive European and Asian history, some African history (mostly how Europe was fucking with it, less so about their actual developments) and a very comprehensive overview of US politics (as well as how to get involved in them).

Reading through these replies makes me genuinely mad. I've always been an avid reader so even while I was in school I knew our history/political education was piss poor, and it really shows. I can't really pick one year apart from the other anymore, and it's hard to discern what I learned IN school vs. on my own, but of what I can remember, our US history education was like: Columbus > Pilgrims > Revolutionary War > Civil War > World War II > Vietnam > 9/11 Some small things in between those but they were pretty much subtexts to these events. We spent YEARS on World War II but only learned the major battles and that the conditions of the concentration camps were bad, and nothing else. Even despite most of our history education being military history, we were taught virtually nothing about World War I or any other war I didn't mention. I literally didn't even know the War of 1812 was a thing until I read about it on my own some time during high school. As far as world history goes, I can't even remember so it clearly wasn't important. Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt, surprisingly very little about Rome, then some famous names from the Renaissance, uh... that's kind of it. Political education was just the basic structure of the US government. The different branches, the democratic process, a few Supreme Court cases, a bit about the famous presidents (Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, etc) and that's all. The list of what I didn't learn, but should've, is longer than I could write here really. It's easy to see why nobody gives a shit about history or involving themselves politically, because even what little we learned was so watered down that it was practically useless Not to mention everything was so neutralized, apolitical, and disconnected that it was basically misinformation.

My class went from studying ancient Egypt, then straight to WW2 :v One gripe I had with the WW2 classes, was that we never studied the geopolitics that led to war; why Germany made the decisions it did, manifesting into Barbarossa, for instance (why it focused its offensive in the south towards the Caucasus for instance). It was less about the war, and more about the holocaust, and general German war crimes than the fighting itself (although Stalingrad had a chapter). I remember noting in my finals essay, that during an event; Hitler cut a portion of a cake, spelling out Baku on it. Believe it had a positive effect on my final grade, as our teacher encouraged us to self study and surprise her. Nowadays, self study in the topic has led to the majority of my knowledge of history; however it is limited admittedly to eras of potential hegemons in Europe.