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There was very little discussion of US actions in the Philippines in my middle school / high school history courses. There was some coverage in 10th grade world
by jacobolus 7y ago
There was very little discussion of US actions in the Philippines in my middle school / high school history courses. There was some coverage in 10th grade world history, but the 11th grade US history course pretty much skipped it.
I can remember as a 15–16 year old high school student having a discussion about this with the teacher and other students, because we (the students) thought it was a serious oversight which left a whitewashed impression of the history of US international relations.
In general, the US and its military are consistently treated as “good guys” in American high school history courses, even when discussing events where that summary is insupportable by dispassionate analysis.
- dkarl 7y agoI can believe that it was different in other places. In fact, it's probably different at my old school now that conservative parents have been taught to be vigilant and constantly enraged about what their children are learning. Still, I think it's noteworthy that my old classmates remember our teachers as being uniformly conservative and narrow-minded when in fact we were reading bell hooks and examining John Donne's religious poems for sexual imagery, and that they have conspiratorial notions of teachers hiding information from us that they in fact tried very hard to teach us. (Tuskegee airmen, boarding schools for Native Americans, etc.) Science, too, I remember every single science teacher drilling into us that all scientific theories are incomplete, provisional, often based on limited data, and likely to be improved or even disproved in the future, and the students who sat in those classes with me remember us being brainwashed to think scientists are omniscient and infallible.