Are americans taught about the "shadiest" aspects of their history in school?
Like, if I ask a good student from a decent school that is about to graduate, would he know basic shit like Gulf of Tonkin, Nayirah, Batista, shit like the government using organized crime against the Panthers, etc?
And I'm not asking if he might know because he could have read about in on the internet. I'm asking if the teachers explained this shit, if it's featured in a honest way on history textbooks, etc.
I come from a small school in Texas. It seems like all the history classes stop after World War II. The textbook keeps going, but ignores all of that stuff.
I read about the Panthers, but only in so far as that they were the "wrong" guys for advocating people be ready to use violent resistance against violence, compared to Saint MLK who totally did not at all preach socialism.
In my experience the answer would be yes, for the 19th century at least. The Independence War is romanticized but African slavery as well as the ruthless attacks on Indians and Mexico are covered. But once it hits the 20th suddenly the American state is a knight in shining armor, a global champion of liberty against communism and fascism. After the 1898 war US imperialism is totally glossed over.
Do you guys think social movements, activists and so on should be fighting to put all that shit into textbooks?
A critical perspective of the past is the best way to ensure better judgement in the future imo.
Why do that when we could be fighting for freedom
Once a student gets to a university, there is no end to the postcolonial bawwwwing about the plight of the subaltern at the hands of the evil white man. Beyond that, there is very little said about real imperialism.
idpol, not even once.
Proof that post-colonialism promotes liberalism at the expense of socialism.
Not really. I mean there's slavery and indians, but there was pretty much nothing after that. Admittedly I started to do a lot more drugs and focused more on fucking girls and my shitty punk band than school when we were covering that shit. But I would get at least a "B" on my tests so I'm pretty sure I got the gist of it.
t. Houstonfag
High school in the States is so fucked. I made it a point to do absolutely none of the work in my senior year just to see if I could pass anyway by acing the tests. It worked, and I finished with a B.
Me too nigga. My gpa dropped like a stone and I almost didn't pass English because I skipped several projects, but I would sleep in class and still pull off at least Bs on tests. It should probably be fixed to be less bullshit and more learning, but I doubt that's gonna happen.
Yeah, there is no way that will change. The purpose of school below the university level is not to teach anymore. It is just a babysitting service for the parents who need to work two jobs just to survive.
I don't see anything wrong with that. Some jewish financed niggers got to know where their place is again -win
Literally frankfurt school tier subversion. Nice.
The worst offense is by far misrepresentation of the labor movement. The way its presented in textbooks makes it sounds like your average liberal movement nowadays, and they never talk about the radicalism that was integral to the movement
Yeah, just another reason capitalism is shit. Would have liked to have actually learn something though.
No OP of course not, in US the civil religion is that the US is perfect, thus cannot be criminal and all who oppose US are de facto criminal. Maybe we did some sorta bad things back at the turn of the century but
But seriously US education is a clear example of an ideological state apparatus as outlined by Althusser. Here is what poor mostly minority high school kids are being fed.
Holy fucking kek.
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kill yourself nigger lover
Not before I pozz your future wife (^:
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Go fuck your pillow while and dream of Donald "BEAUTIFUL JEWISH BABIES" being your alpha you impotent beta.
I know, comrades! And they are being peddled this by a econ teacher who is an Amy vet so, the social reproduction just goes round and round.
IDEA: A Holla Forums-bunkermag project called "The American Ideology" sort of in the vein of Chomsky/Marx's German Ideology (Chomsky's historical criticisms, Marx's self-clarification and philosophy) to basically smash this kind of bullshit but also the liberal/social-democratic ideas of Bernouts
Such a text exists but only from a soc-dem standpoint amazon.com
(yes, the five-star review says "laying a strong foundation for social democratic change" – yet the author has the audacity to title his other book 'A Future For Marxism?' I almost feel bad for academic Marxists)
My textbook defined communism as "The centralization of all power and property in a nation into the hands of a single dictator."
In my experience, Millennial Americlaps are taught a decent amount about:
We are basically not taught anything at all about other CIA activities in the last century. We learn little to nothing about the Banana Wars, various coups, American support for the Nazis, etc. Nothing about Black Panthers, and very little about Malcolm X. Whenever we're taught about American heroes like Mark Twain, MLK, Helen Keller, etc. we are not informed about their socialist views.
I think that the history books have definitely improved over how they were in the 80s and earlier, and it may have had a big influence on why millennials are so left-wing. But the textbooks are still pretty shite.
Even if they wanted to equate Communism with Marxist-Leninist countries that's still wrong except for maybe mid-1930's Russia.
yeah nah
I live in California and even my textbooks are full of propaganda, usually like "MUH LIBERAL DEMOCRACY WOW JEEZ WHERE DID ALL THE NATIVE AMERICANS GO?"
Some older things were mentioned (twenty years ago, when I was in school) like Indians and slavery, but only as BAD THINGS that WE DON'T DO ANYMORE because THEY WERE BAD and WE ARE GOOD NOW. And even then, it was mostly whitewashed.
George Washington's massacres of the Iroquois, for example, won't be mentioned, although the diseases will be because disease seems a lot more ambivalent than "The first American President ordered his men to commit genocide."
Likewise with slavery, which was apparently invented primarily for the purpose of causing the Civil War so that the Union could be GOOD GUYS.
And of course, class struggle is comepletely ommitted. I'm not even talking from a revolutionary perspective, but even from a Trade Unionist or Reformist angle.
Why is the standard work week 40 hours? This seems like a basic question, but no American history class will be able to answer it, because that would be admitting that workers organizing against their bosses can be a good thing, and this is unacceptable.
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Good idea, use Hardt and Negri's Empire and David Harvey's Brief History of Neo-liberalism and Condition of post modernity. I'm down for it if anybody wants me to write anything about it.
yes
no
vaguely
Too much living memory, I don't know that this is something which can be evenly historicized.
I suppose it depends on where you went, because curricula was pretty broadly defined( at least it was in my day) and some schools covered more things in more detail than others.
For instance, we read "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair and "War is a Racket" by Smedley Butler.
We also read some Jack London, and "Homage to Catalonia".
It was a Catholic school ironically enough, so the quality of the education was a step above what you'd get in the glorified zoos everyone else went to.
my high schools taught more than that, but that's still better than what Americlaps used to get taught.
Shay's Rebellion taught me about the true purpose of identity politics.
The white man enslaved africans and treated them badly
the indians were forced to move my Andrew Jackson
I believe this is skipped over
black people and white people couldn't use the same bathrooms or drink from the same fountains.
usually only just mentioned
decent
they told us Hiroshima happened and then my chemistry teacher explained why we should have bombed the island into a crater to "stop them japs'.
Almost never, and when they are it always comes with a certain amount of damage control.
I feel like my entire Highschool education, as far as history goes, was a waste.
Catholic school attendee here. Maybe yours is different, but at mine it is nothing but postcolonialism and intersectionality in nearly every history class. Is your school Jesuit?
All of high school is a waste.
I am not from the US, and I had quite literally forgotten all of my high school years.Yet this rings quite close to the bullshit I still have around in my old books.Granted, back then I saw passing tests more as a way to earn the appreciation and reinforcement that my asshole parents didn't give me than learning, so I did not question anything.
Now that i think of it, most my teachers were clear cut liberuls.
I have one particularly funny story about the whole minorities thing:
Now , there were a very small minority of good people among the relocated,I understood that race/skin color /ethnicity was irrelevant and that the culture/education/environment that those people developed in was the reason they were like that.And soon after I realized the liberul politics and my shitty parents were most of the reason the situation got this bad.
I do, however, understand how in this circumstances some people can go full polyp and "MUH RACE MUTTERS", in fact, quite a lot of the people I know from back then , did.And quite honestly, I think most of them had it easy, comparatively speaking.
mostly they taught about political correctness, Indians, Slavery, women's rights and such. They tended to be very dodgy around workers rights, labor unions, and Shaws Rebellion.
American public education is effectively controlled by its most arrogantly revisionist and paranoid people. I am, of course, talking about the parts of Texas outside of the nice modern cities.
nybooks.com
When I was in high school, what we were taught was basically FUCK YEAH WARS WARS WARS WARS AMERICA DOES LITERALLY NOTHING WRONG EVER. Naturally, our lessons about the Khmer Rouge were an autobiographical novel of personal experience meant to evoke an emotional reaction, no historical treatise that could have pointed out how the Western world effectively condoned the savagery. No mention of the shady political meanderings of the US in the Middle East either. All silently left out of the books.
When I took my one AP class, Politics, the difference wasn't night and day, it was a different planet.
Los gitanos no son más que lumpenes que no merecen ni el mas mínimo respeto, camarada.
No me considero racista, ni mucho menos, pero se han ganado su infamia a pulso desde hace siglos. Es cierto que el crecer en determinados ambientes condiciona tu modo de ser, pero no es motivo alguno para mantener ese comportamiento cuando empiezas a desarrollar contacto con "el mundo exterior" y te das cuenta que robar y vivir del cuento no es necesariamente el camino, prueba de ello son los gitanos que han dedicido estudiar y ganarse la vida honradamente. Créeme que ellos saben como funciona el mundo mejor que nadie, simplemente escogen vivir así porque les parece exageradamente cómodo, ¿Para que vas a estudiar o a trabajar cuando puedes robar fácilmente?
Tienes mi solidaridad y respeto por haber tenido que aguantar semejante situación. ¿De dónde eres, si se me permite la pregunta?
After putting this through Google Translate I'd like to point out that gypsies seem to have an extremely insular culture so the kids that fight and steal don't know any different. They grow up with a strong "us vs them" mentality and it's hard to shake.
This is why Holla Forums mentality is so dangerous to begin with. It would doom human civilization to an eternity of petty conflict. At least neoliberalism has nice things.
Americans are half way red pilled. They understand the role of the state but at the same time worship private capital.
They do, but the ones who go to the school and meet other people unrelated to his usual enviroment actually know that they can do better, they just refuse to, because they know robbing is way easier than studying and having a job. That's not "not knowing any different", that's just choosing to be a lazy asshole.
That's pretty much what I expected.
I think it's easy for the educational system to shit on slavery, segregation etc. because they've erased those institutions. It's not that easy to shit on institutions, organizations and people that still exist/are still alive.
That's what I mean by "us vs them", it's easy to preemptively turn someone away from different ideas to prevent them from changing their mind.
This is what poor people think when they don't want to work hard: that the real world is a farce that will fuck them over, so they may as well take the easy route and accept their role as lumpens.
Does this excuse the behavior? Obviously not. But it's a good example of how liberalism has failed where socialism would mend societal wounds.
Only the stuff about the Panthers was in my curriculum. Since my history teachers were pretty leftist they didn't paint the Panthers as bad guys IIRC. Otherwise, like others have said, it mostly stopped after WW2.
I don't think I even got an explanation on what the Panthers were supposed to be, they were name dropped in subtle ways meant to paint them as dangerous and poorly intended.
Raised in a blue state, so only in the context of idpol. Everything bad in history ever was done by heterosexual Burger WASP males (or occasionally Bongs and maybe Baguettes for the advanced courses; cisgendered wasn't mentioned because that cancer hadn't gotten severe yet), and totally not Porky, economics, tragedy of the commons and other material factors.
And because some of my teachers were those kind of hippies who sell out and become yuppies at a certain age, Richard Nixon was the most cocksucking piece of animate fecal matter to ever stalk the Earth, but the War on Drugs he started did nothing wrong. I didn't learn much history but I got a good look into world of the mind of people raised on Cold War politics.
I heard this a whole lot, because it's porky bullshit meant to justify maintaining economic scarcity. It's little more than a politically correct dog whistle for "poor people are stupid and need to be controlled for their own good".
I went to high school in a blue state but never heard any white guilt stuff aside from slavery.
I think this is a fantastic idea, and I could help write something like that, but it would be best if I could collaborate with others on something like that.
What do you all think? Should I start a thread about it?
Jesus.
My own (college) textbooks were pro- "mixed" economy but at least they actually admitted that centralized economies had advantages.
Yep.
Purcell-Marian in Cincinnati.
It was probably at least partially my teachers, one of them had an mostly-understandable chip on his shoulder about Whitey and was just kind of a shitty teacher. our school was pretty much an IRL soap opera
Britbong here
Honestly any education source in a western capitalist country will be filled with P U R E I D E O L O G Y.
I'm from Iowa and I'd like to think that our public schools are little more "progressive" in this respect: our education has never been overtly nationalistic.
Admittedly, there are plenty of holes. Basically all the stuff you listed wasn't there, but I'm pretty sure that had more to do with an already jam-packed curriculum than censorship. In my US history class, we had literally an entire unit that was called "US Imperialism", where we learned about the Spanish-American War, the war with Mexico, the Pacific territories, and the Native American genocide. We also spent a week on the Pacific theater of World War II with a big discussion and activity about the ethical problems with dropping the bombs. And of course there was a unit on the Vietnam War, which I don't think any school can really put in a positive light. This was a required freshman course, btw.
This school also had a dank af World Issues class which went in depth on genocide, imperialism, and terrorism.
So yeah, I think it was alright. Definitely more liberal than leftist, mind you, but still p good. My world history class even had a correct definition of communism and didn't give me any bullshit about socialism being unarguably "wrong", which is apparently pretty rare in US schools.
Unrelated to thread but I really like those panels. Captain America is p fuckin chill tbh, I remember there was a civil war what-if miniseries where Captain America became the leader of the western half of the US and basically turned it into an anarchist communal system.
I get that shit at my university, although it always comes from a postmodern perspective rather than an AMERICA FUCK YEAH position.
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I went to arguably the best public school in my state and they didn't even cover the fact that people were against the Vietnam War.
I dunno, in the university I was trained to be a biologist. It really ought to be collaborative, as we have more info in our brains pooled together and the labor is too much for one individual.
I would begin by wondering about the logical structure, and what exactly needs to be BTFO. I was looking around the catalog and I see a thread on 'worker's """compensation"""' and one about the job search and how what it means to get a job is to basically not ask for your individual self to be taken care of, it's about spreading your buttcheeks to get fucked. But this is pure ideology; the worker-capitalist relationship described by Marx is between indifferent and equal individuals. The relationship we see today is a whole 'give in to the greater good', the individual totally subsumed by the process of capital accumulation, so I think any American ideology pamphlet/book should focus on anti-work (incl. alienation and what social reproduction means), violence, spectacular society, neoliberalism, the alt-right, soc-dem.
holy fuck why are there so many shit threads. it's like summerfag city in here.
Look again at the page on 'market economics' at the bottom right, after all the enumerations. It says that equity doesn't really work out [but of course it's the best because freedom to buy stuff!]
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