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

My memory of my childhood is shot to hell (I believe my brain intentionally has censored most of it for my own benefit - growing up was fucking stressful for me because of mental illness), but between the few years I went to public school, and all the years I was homeschooled, I did thankfully learn some important things - like that our country was and is super racist. My earliest memory of actually being driven to tears over real life history was reading the sequel to the book Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry, where the innocent black guy that is arrested at at the end of the previous book is sentenced to death, and the all-white jury who convicts him is applauded. I was in sixth grade. I knew even though it was just a novel, and the characters were made up, it was otherwise true, and it made me so fucking mad. I know for a fact my mom has taught my other two brothers the same way. She taught my youngest brother about the Trail of Tears in elementary school. Our family has never done the America worshiping shit that so many other Evangelical families do, and thank god for that.

If I was a racist asshole and I hit a black guy with my car and it was not intentional, that itself is not racist. If it was intentional, then it would be murder. Sure, if I had a history of being a racist asshole and claimed it to be an accident that muddies the water a little bit but does not instantly make it a racist act. As I keep saying, intent behind actions is important or else you can look back on anything in life and say 'ooh this guy was an x so he must have purposefully did y to z group because he was an x'. And again, for stuff like the Clearances only a small amount of those involved were known to have views of discrimination against Gaels. You can't paint the entire thing as an ethnic cleansing because of the beliefs held by a minority of the perpetrators.

Yep, it just also happened to be a belief common enough to be openly mentioned in Lowlands Newspapers at the time, divorced from Patrick Sellars and Sir Charles Trevelyan, whom again merely subscribed to this belief.

Sure, it was mentioned in one paper to a population that I can find no source for or even the name of the paper mentioned and one individual (Sellars) who was involved but later relieved of his position after he was found to be mistreating Gaels he was evicting by the Sutherlands. There was only ever a small minority involved in the clearances who held these views and you cannot call it an ethnic cleansing if that was not the intent of the vast majority of the Gaelic perpetrators who evicted other Gaels for almost entirely economic reasons. I don't see any real reason in continuing this path of debate. I respect your viewpoint, but I cannot in good faith agree it is an ethnic cleansing.

Likewise. Good debate, and have a good evening.

In Canada I was not taught about the forced sterilization of first nations women and the residential schools' crimes were that they separated the kids from their families by force, I wasn't taught about the other torture they had to survive.

Not quite as dumb but in high school world history someone in my class was surprised to learn that Russia fought in WW2.

Every single history / politic -teacher I had in school were extremes bores that were tired of life and especially students. I remember that we did go through major events in history, Holocaust, Pearl Harbor, WW1 and 2, Finland's own stuff etc. But I can't remember any details really, because I just systematically learned each course by heart and then forgot EVERYTHING after I passed the test.

Unironically, in school they pretty much tell you that everything in the media is a lie and that everyone fucked us over

Wow, i could've never guessed that. /s

The only sad thing here is that you don't have the critical thinking skills to realise that you're in the exact same boat as the people complaining about having 9/11 truthers as teachers.

In history class I learned why Stalin is sometimes considered to be worse than Hitler. It, as well as talking to my Polish grandmother about how horrible the Russians were, made me realize that Patton and Churchill were right, we should have kept going to Moscow.

NJ did fairly well in history education because I remember being pretty into it and one of my favorite classes. Middle school was mostly US Revolutionary War and Early America and it didn't hide much or try to twist anything like southern states do or are currently trying to do. High School started from there and went on to cover following periods rather well, it didn't hide anything about slavery or try to claim the civil war "was about states rights". 6th and 7th grade was mostly about pre-revolutionary war America, 8th was about revolutionary war and the period following it. 9th started from there, covered the Industrial Era and went on to pre-civil war and then 10th grade started from there. My memory isn't the best but we had it pretty well.

I was told everything I needed to know. If I'd paid more attention I would've perhaps learned some more, but the basics has been taught. American politics were a bit more complicated and compressed because of that. But national politics were taught sufficiently.