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

Dropped out freshmen year, but before that I had a history teacher who was a Vietnam Vet that was a pilot for B52s. Awesome guy. Whenever we were discussing sensitive topics like Operation Rolling Thunder, he'd give insight on what they were actually attempting to accomplish, and how it backfired due to politics.

BOSTON TEA PARTY boston tea party BOSTON TEA PARTY boston tea party BOSTON TEA PARTY boston tea party BOSTON TEA PARTY boston tea party BOSTON TEA PARTY boston tea party BOSTON TEA PARTY boston tea party BOSTON TEA PARTY boston tea party BOSTON TEA PARTY boston tea party BOSTON TEA PARTY boston tea party BOSTON TEA PARTY boston tea party BOSTON TEA PARTY boston tea party Repeat for twelve years. Welcome to US public schools.

Credit where credit is due, at least you actually put some effort into that post lmao, unlike most other online marketers/scammers

Studying the Cold War in History and Animal Farm in English basically just taught us how shit Communism was. We also learned about the Great Depression in History and aptly did Of Mice And Men in English which was actually pretty cool to learn about. Then we did Hitlers' foreign policy. I wish we did more British/English (for England of course, if necessary, replace with appropriate British country) history though. A shocking amount of people don't even know we had a civil war/revolution. Even though we've had loads.

Nothing. I literally had to relearn everything for college. 65ish student classrooms will do that. Every class was daycare with busywork. Luckily I have smart parents and Intrest in reading. But nothing in my primary education past maybe elementry school had any resources to provide even the hint of an education. The district wonders why they have a 60% dropout rate. I'm more then a little angry with my education, specifically that my highschool degree is still in limbo, because the for profit online charter school that took the student body of my highschool when it suddenly and dramatically shutdown halfway through the year (because they had still hadn't removed asbestos despite it being the mid 2000s) lost my and about 2 others final credit hours and didn't tell me till I was fucking 24 and to old to get a adult degree. So I'm an on paper dropout, despite having been a straight A student.

I'm somewhere around 80% self-taught for history because I loved the topic so much. All throughout my schooling, history class tended to be the most boring because we would constantly cover material that I had already read about in my own time. I only really took American history classes because as a teenager, I was pretty "America fuck yeah". I do remember my Jewish history teacher becoming visibly upset that our textbook only gave a 7 sentences to mentioning the Holocaust in the entire chapter that regarded World War II. As he explained, because the US did not have any direct involvement with it until after the war, the editors felt no need to include it. As for politics, I literally started with all the basics through Wikipedia. In high school, when the site just went up, I spent hours just looking up different ideologies to see where I fit in and what I agreed with. After that I spent time reading books on my own. School didn't really teach about politics very much, it kept it pretty apolitical unless it was 100+ years ago. It annoyed me that in every US history II class I took, which was suppose to take place from 1865 to present day, every class conveniently stopped at 1965 and Vietnam.

I learned absolutely fuck all of use, even about local politics and history, because at the time I was still at school, the schoolbooks we were given were riddled with terrible mistakes. Such as, for instance, Tutankhamen was the greatest pharao (sic) of egypt. And to add insult to injury, we had to memorize those mistakes word for word because of the way the answer keys for the final exams would be set, or no marks. As a history buff, particularly of classical civs, 10th grade was a dark year. Fortunately it was the last year we had history in school, so I could go back to my large collection of historical books instead.

Just to describe my history class experiences. This happened when i was a Senior. Random Girl - "Did we lose WW2?" Commence the loudest facepalm ever heard in that High-school.

Pretty much this, but I live in California. That one "history of the world" by Bill wurst I think his name is? Has stuck with me and taught more.

My incredibly rural Arkansas school system never got passed the American Civil War each year. I remember my senior year none of my classmates knew that Russia used to be the Soviet Union or what an ICBM was. They were surprised to learn that NATO was in fact a real thing and not made up for Call of Duty.

Because of where I live, I was literally told to vote republican in my 9th grade political science class. The south is awful

I went to a private school in Scotland and received what I feel was a pretty balanced education, albeit with a heavy nationalist slant. Friends who went to different Scottish schools said they did different things from me so I assume each school picks subjects to study from a list or something. If you took a class called Modern Studies you would learn about the Scottish and Westminster Parliamentary systems as well as the US Presidential and Congress/Senate systems and the EU Parliament. It was all very objective and balanced, in my opinion. However, I cannot say the same for history. The only element of history that was dealt with outside of Scotland was the Second World War and Cold War, everything else was based around Scotland and focused heavily on painting England as some evil entity trying to fuck over Scotland. The Scottish Wars of Independence was covered every year and Wallace and Bruce were painted as being basically heroes who could do no wrong (although, to their credit, the teachers did make a point of showing examples of Bruce's hypocrisy and other things, but this was not part of the course content). However I did feel there was a lot of bias in the Highland Clearances where the school described it as an 'ethnic cleansing' and genocide by the English, but when you take the time to research it yourself it becomes clear that it was really all about landowners wanting money, including Lowlander Scots, and it was easier to get rid of the Gaelic speakers and send them to North America and take their land as they didn't speak English and were less educated. Which is still shitty but absolutely not a genocide. The Clearances were compared to the treatment of Native Americans while in reality the two could not be compared. Other than that little bit of very questionable revisionist history, though, I felt it was alright. We also had mandatory Holocaust Studies in final year.

History in a state school wasn't like that, at least in the compulsory bits I got (I did Geography instead in my Standard Grades) - It was Roman Britain, the highlights of the middle ages, and then WW1 and 2. And, you do realise that Ethnic cleansing does not have to include killing, and in fact does include "Mass Explusion"? Which was exactly what happened to the gaelic speaking highlanders removed in the Highland Clearances? Highland Clearances were definitely an Ethnic Cleansing, just not necessarily a genocide (because definitions disagree on whether Genocide is purely the destruction part of an Ethnic Cleansing or is synonymous with)

I went to a private school here, so we were taught everything from ancient history to WWII throughout the world. We even were taught how to check things like bias, background, and reliability of sources when researching issues, which we put to use in projects. I heard the horror stories from a classmate who previously went to a public school, where the classes are heavily biased towards Japan. They skip anything that makes Japan look even remotely bad, and even otherwise they do not go very in-depth about stuff that happened outside Japan. I am really thankful that I was able to go to the school I went to. In fact, I probably would not be here on Facepunch if I did not go to that school, it is where I got my English skills.

I'm gonna still have to disagree it was an ethnic cleansing. There was mass expulsion, sure, but it was off the poorer Highlanders. The way much of the clearances were carried out was absolutely disgusting and appalling, but they were primarily targeted because they were poor and their landlords wanted to use the land for more profitable farming, not because they were Gaelic speakers. What the Clearances were about was that rich landowners wanted to supplant the land held by their subjects for sheep as that had become more profitable, and those subjects happened to be Gaelic speakers. We've also got to bear in mind that some Gaelic speakers chose to voluntarily relocate to North America and Gaelic Highlanders who did not hold any farmland were largely unaffected; Gaelic craftsmen, fishermen and others on the estates were not targetted. Further, if the Highland Clearances were an attempted ethnic cleansing of Gaelic speakers then it does not explain why many of the Gaelic speaking clan chiefs were complicit in the clearances and largely supported the clearances as they would profit from it. The Sutherland Clearances in particular as this is one of the largest and best studied episodes and show that it was a result of callous economic mismanagement by the clan leadership and landowners. When the Gaelic speakers were initially forced off their land (which is not an action I am defending, I want to be clear here) they were offered new jobs and homes in fishing communities, but these were rejected by most of the population who would later voluntarily choose to move to North America. Later during the Sutherland Clearances cattle farmers who were forced off their land where granted sums of money and the offer of homes elsewhere in the estates. Furthermore when Sellar, one of the Sutherland's wardens and one of the few individuals known to openly display discrimination against Gaelic speakers, chose to burn down a house with an bedridden mother he was charged with homicide and arson and the Sutherland family distanced himself from him and cut off support to him. While Sellar was later acquitted (as a result of the law system favouring the wealthy and nobility over anything else), the Sutherlands would relieve him of his post and he was forced out of the estate. These actions do not line up well with the theory of ethnic cleansing and while there was indeed smaller clearances that may have been motivated by discrimination, to call the Clearances as a whole an ethnic cleansing is a result of misinformation in my opinion. My father is a Gaelic Hebridean himself and a point Hebrideans often bring up is that Gaelic speakers in places like the Hebrides and other Western Isles were not targeted because they did not have land worthwhile taking. An example of targetting of Gaelic speakers is the Gaelic language ban in school which crippled the language in most of the country where it was spoken, the Clearances were targeting poor Gaels because they were poor and could be exploited, not because they were Gaelic speakers. The Clearances were almost entirely a result of the poor being exploited in exchange for the wealthy to grow more wealthy. The way the Clearances are popularly shown in history is a warped view of a terrible event that has been used increasingly by people with a political agenda. The Highland Clearances was a disgusting thing, to be sure, but it was not an ethnic cleansing. If the Gaels were targeted because they were Gaels then there might be an argument to be made, but this was not the case. It was poor people targeted because they were poo and rich people wanted more money, not because they were Gaels.

Sorry Kotov, you're ignoring the fact that there actually was an ethnic element to it. The primary motivation for clearance was economic. Associated with this was the suggestion by some theorists that the Celtic population were less hardworking than those of Anglo-Saxon stock (i.e. Lowlanders and, in some instances, English), so giving an economic element to a racial theory. James Hunter quotes a contemporary Lowland newspaper: ‘Ethnologically the Celtic race is an inferior one and, attempt to disguise it as we may, there is . . . no getting rid of the great cosmical fact that it is destined to give way . . . before the higher capabilities of the Anglo-Saxon.’ These views were held by people like Patrick Sellar, the factor employed by the Countess of Sutherland to put her plans into effect, who often wrote of his support for these ideas The fact that some of celtic stock (i.e. Clan Chiefs and Rich Landowners) were complicit in it doesn't make the fact that it was in fact ethnically motivated any less an issue, and therefore an ethnic cleansing. There have always been people who collaborate in an ethnic cleansing because they stand to gain in some way. The hard fact of it is that however you try to justify it by talking about the (supposed - as demonstrated, the reasons were not purely economic) motivations being economic, it was functionally an Ethnic Cleansing. Gaelic speakers were all but eradicated across Scotland apart from western enclaves due to it.

Nothing. The last 100 years was 3 chapters, devoted to america's wars. Even the great depression and the ecological destruction spawned by the dust bowl are glossed over as stock problems not a failing of conservative ideology that left people to suffer for years before fdr and the socialists and democrats came in and used the government to put the country back together and fix the environmental destruction that was creating the massive dust storms.

Ok, sure, there was a small proportion of landlords and their agents who were proponents of the idea of the Gaels being an inferior race and quoting Robert Knox's racial theory but this was a small minority and the major reason for the Clearances was economic, not ethnic discrimination. The exact same thing would have happened had the Highlanders been primarily English speakers (and let's not forget that there was, in fact, non-Gaelic Highlanders who also suffered in the clearances also. The Clearances were the result of a greedy ruling class from primarily Gaelic backgrounds fucking over a region that happened to be Gaelic majority. I'd like to highlight that there was also English-speaking communities who suffered under the Clearances as well. There was also not that many English speakers directly involved with the clearances. Those that were most often hired by and acting on the behalf of the Gaelic landholders. This was the vast majority of the time Gaelic landlords evicting Gaelic tenants. If this had happened anywhere else and was not muddied by political revisionism would it still be considered an ethnic cleansing? I am not denying there was not an ethnic element, but this was only in a handful of individual Clearances and absolutely not the primary reason for the Clearances. Yes, the Gaelic community suffered horribly but it was largely at the hands of people from their own ethnic group with very little outside involvement for primarily economic reasons. I don't see how an incident can be labelled as an ethnic cleansing if it was perpetrated by people from the same ethnic group against others and the intent was largely not to remove them entirely, only to shift them to more profitable activities. Still an awful and traumatic thing, yes, but not ethnically motivated. Also, bear in mind that many of the landowners, especially groups such as the MacLeods and MacDonalds, had holdings in both the Western Isles and the Highlands. Both regions were Gaelic speakers yet only the Highland crofters were forced off their land. If it was a ethnic cleansing, and the groups had powers to expulse even more Gaels, then why would they completely ignore the entire Western Isles? Also please re-read my previous post. Where exactly did I justify anything about the Clearances? I said that I do not agree it was an ethnic cleansing, but I made it clear that it was still an awful thing that happened and was not acceptable. Retroactively calling something an ethnic cleansing does not necessarily make it one and I'd appreciate you not building strawmen and telling me I was attempting to justifying something when I was simply disagreeing with it being an ethnic cleansing, not that it was acceptable in any way.

Elementary school we were taught that America was a paradise and any other nation was a freedomless pit. Middle school there was a lack of history class, for some reason. Although we were taught a lot about Brazil. High school we covered slavery and that was about it. Most of my knowledge about the world and politics came from my own passionate investigations on the internet.

I never said that you were justifying it, I said that by pretending the justifications given for it were purely economic behooves the truth of the matter. Two entirely different things. We're going to have to agree to disagree, I think. I come down on the same side as interpretations by historians such as James Hunter. We can dance around it but we're discussing the same things and coming up with different interpretations. For me, the fact that it was indeed ethnically motivated by primary movers-and-shakes such as Patrick Sellars and Sir Charles Trevalayne (a man who described himself as a "reformed Celt" and hated his own Cornish Celtic descent), and the fact that it functionally resulted in an ethnic cleansing makes it one. You prefer to dance around it and because of the economic justifications given at the time and the fact that it wasn't a total one (which is not a requirement for an ethnic cleansing) call it not one.

A lot of elementary school history I had tried to glamorize early America and its history. But actually, middle school and onward most teachers did there best to instill in our young minds that we have the capacity to be pretty horrible. Including stealing the native Americans land and slaughtering them all, treating black people who fought for the U.S like shit, locking up the American japs etc. Government classes highlighted the importance of voting, previous government scandals like Watergate I guess Minnesota is a bit more well rounded than our other friends in the Union.

If you are going to continue holding that belief then you are free to do so, but ask yourself this - if English speaking landowners did the same thing to English speaking tenants then would it be an ethnic cleansing? Throw in some Gaelic-speaking intermediaries working on behalf of the landowners and it is the same thing. Also, that quote? The first line states 'the primary reason for the clearances was economic'. This has been my entire argument; there was some amount of ethnic discrimination in some areas, I've not denied that at any point, but it was primarily for economic reasons and you cannot call something an ethnic cleansing if that was not the reason for it occurring. Intent matters, and there is no evidence that action would have been taken if there was no economic factor. Furthermore we need to remember that this is one newspaper that is not named 'nor is there a link to a source so I cannot check which paper it was', but one has to remember that widespread readership of papers in Scotland was restricted until well into the 19th century after the Clearances as literacy rates remained very poor, both in the Highland and Lowland. Another thing to remember is that at the time there was no real press regulation and anyone who owned a newspaper could say whatever the hell they wanted; you see that even today with stricter regulation so this does not necessarily mean that it was a popular view, only that it was held by someone who had enough money and power to write in in a paper. I cannot put the Highland Clearances up as an ethnic cleansing in any good personal conscience. It was an awful thing that happened and absolutely the wealthy landowners are to be held accountable for the treatment of their tenants, but it was not an ethnic cleansing as that was not the primary motivation, nor was it even a major motivation and a belief only held by those employed by the Gaelic landlords to evict Gaelic tenants. Tangentially related but I feel that it supports my argument; when the Irish Famine is called a Genocide. Was the Irish Famine absolutely awful and a result of British actions? Of course it was, but it was not a genocide. The intent was not to wipe out the Irish as an ethnic group as a result of the famine, it was down to massive British mismanagement and general crappiness. But it was not primarily ethnically motivated. Nonetheless, like the clearances, a horrible event has been dressed up as a deliberate attempt at ethnic cleansing and used as a political tool. There's a pretty good video on this too if you want to take a look; relevant timestamp is 7.10 (yes, it's about the Irish Famine but the explanation of calculating something as ethnic cleansing/genocide is talked through extensively) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIiAI1oRt88

Something I always have to ask people who hold this view - Do you consider the Holodomor a genocide then, as is the popular view? Because the Great Famine and the Holodomor share a great deal in common.

To be fair I do not have a huge familiarity with Holdomor. From what I currently understand it was a deliberate act but I know there is a bit of historical debate and controversy surrounding it but I will say this; If it was a deliberate famine instigated to wipe out Ukrainians then yes, I would consider that a genocide. If it was more in line with the Irish Famine and a result of massive Soviet mismanagement and lack of care, then I would not say it is a genocide as there needs to be the primary intent behind it. To call something a genocide your intent needs to be the extermination of a specific group. In both cases, however, it is clear that the Soviet regime was 100% responsible and holds responsibility for the deaths and suffering it caused in any case.

I think that is probably the point of disagreement we have then. You're concerned with ethnic extermination being a core-or-stated reason for the actions, I'm concerned with the effect, especially since the ascribed motivation is in the hands of the perpetrator in all three cases and therefore incredibly suspect (especially given proponents at the time did view both the Celts and the Irish as inferior - hello again Sir Trevelyan). That is what I mean when I talk about the justifications up thread. The effect (removal, in the case of the HC, of a large proportion of an ethnic group, and removal/death of around 25% of the Irish) is functionally equivalent to Ethnic Cleansing (and Genocide) even if they weren't wearing those motivations on their sleeve. (Some of the primary dramatis personae involved just happened to harbour those beliefs. Hmmm)

my geography teacher was a 9/11 truther

I don't think calling the effect of something that has the end result of ethnic cleansing 'ethnic cleansing' is a good idea. It's a bit like the difference between manslaughter and murder (yes I know being responsible for the death of millions being compared to manslaughter is a bit sketchy but stay with me) Let's say I accidentally knock down and kill someone with my car because I'm a terrible irresponsible driver, let's say I'm drunk as a skunk and texting while driving with one hand or whatever. Now let's compare that to me intentionally killing someone with my car. The result is the same but the intent here is very different; neglect and lack of responsibility compared to the intentional aim to kill.

I didn't know about apartheid until after high school. So jack shit.

Okay, but to make it accurate, you have to extend your metaphor to get the point that you're making. We also have to assume that the hypothetical you in this situation has a history of believing that black person are inferior/useless and that the person you happened to hit is black. Now did you do it deliberately, is the handwringing about your mismanagement of the vehicle etc a convenient fiction, or was it really an accident? Better to be incompetent than a murderer, right?