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Yeah, high school history tends to skip from the civil war to WW1, so most students miss out on reconstruction, and pretty much no curricula will talk about the

Yeah, high school history tends to skip from the civil war to WW1, so most students miss out on reconstruction, and pretty much no curricula will talk about the explicit race discrimination in the GI bill/redlining.

salawat 4y ago
What high school students curricula are you following? All of those topics were covered where I went. Though interestingly, the ones I do also tend to get across the point that caste discrimination was made illegal in India, and never tend to go into much explicit detail on how just because something is illegal, it doesn't mean it isn't done/is regularly enforced.
jcranmer 4y ago
> high school history tends to skip from the civil war to WW1 I very, very highly doubt that. In terms of US history, this period covers several important topics: * Reconstruction * Settling of the American West * Rise of the Granger and later Progressive movements * Burgeoning immigration to the US, and all the tensions that result from that * Second Industrial Revolution, which also fuels the Gilded Age and labor movements * Beginnings of American imperialism (and somewhat ironically, the end of it... the US becomes pretty uninterested in territorial expansion almost immediately after experiencing its first major bout of imperial expansion in the Spanish-American War). It's possible that you just don't remember what you learned in US history classes in this time period, but completely excising a quarter of the country's history would be rather surprising, especially when it's the part of the history that covers both the biggest shift in self-image (from an agrarian country distancing itself from world politics to an industrialized powerhouse increasingly engaged in world politics) and the development of mass political consciousness worldwide in the late Long 19th Century.
- throwaway0a5e 4y ago
  I was really interested in history (so presumably I paid attention) and my education mirrors his. I went to a good public school in a state that people who are looking to lie with statistics in order to make a politically charged point like to hold up as a pinnacle of educational achievement. Pretty much any topic that someone who is a big proponent of government solutions to problems might find troublesome got glossed over as quickly as possible. Thankfully I lucked into the English section taught by the female equivalent of Ron Swanson who made us read books that covered the Jim Crow south and the Indian wars. Looking back she was obviously a bull #### and rightfully had a bone to pick when it came to mistreatment of demographic groups under color of law.
  - tptacek 4y ago
    I can't parse your second sentence. I went to high school in Chicago, in the 1990s. Everything 'jcranmer mentions mirrors my own experience. We definitely didn't skip from the Civil War to WW1.
lthornberry 4y ago
This varies massively by school or district. I teach history to undergrads, and some of them come in having had entire high school classes on the history of civil rights--these students are usually either from majority-black districts, or from elite private schools. Others had history classes that don't even acknowledge that slavery was the cause of the Civil War.

salawat 4y ago

What high school students curricula are you following? All of those topics were covered where I went. Though interestingly, the ones I do also tend to get across the point that caste discrimination was made illegal in India, and never tend to go into much explicit detail on how just because something is illegal, it doesn't mean it isn't done/is regularly enforced.

jcranmer 4y ago

> high school history tends to skip from the civil war to WW1 I very, very highly doubt that. In terms of US history, this period covers several important topics: * Reconstruction * Settling of the American West * Rise of the Granger and later Progressive movements * Burgeoning immigration to the US, and all the tensions that result from that * Second Industrial Revolution, which also fuels the Gilded Age and labor movements * Beginnings of American imperialism (and somewhat ironically, the end of it... the US becomes pretty uninterested in territorial expansion almost immediately after experiencing its first major bout of imperial expansion in the Spanish-American War). It's possible that you just don't remember what you learned in US history classes in this time period, but completely excising a quarter of the country's history would be rather surprising, especially when it's the part of the history that covers both the biggest shift in self-image (from an agrarian country distancing itself from world politics to an industrialized powerhouse increasingly engaged in world politics) and the development of mass political consciousness worldwide in the late Long 19th Century.

throwaway0a5e 4y ago
I was really interested in history (so presumably I paid attention) and my education mirrors his. I went to a good public school in a state that people who are looking to lie with statistics in order to make a politically charged point like to hold up as a pinnacle of educational achievement. Pretty much any topic that someone who is a big proponent of government solutions to problems might find troublesome got glossed over as quickly as possible. Thankfully I lucked into the English section taught by the female equivalent of Ron Swanson who made us read books that covered the Jim Crow south and the Indian wars. Looking back she was obviously a bull #### and rightfully had a bone to pick when it came to mistreatment of demographic groups under color of law.
- tptacek 4y ago
  I can't parse your second sentence. I went to high school in Chicago, in the 1990s. Everything 'jcranmer mentions mirrors my own experience. We definitely didn't skip from the Civil War to WW1.

lthornberry 4y ago

This varies massively by school or district. I teach history to undergrads, and some of them come in having had entire high school classes on the history of civil rights--these students are usually either from majority-black districts, or from elite private schools. Others had history classes that don't even acknowledge that slavery was the cause of the Civil War.