IMO it is not possible to keep incidents of deep national atrocities in school curriculum while avoiding the generation of non-trivial bitterness, anxiety, or g

IMO it is not possible to keep incidents of deep national atrocities in school curriculum while avoiding the generation of non-trivial bitterness, anxiety, or guilt about the past — whether we're talking about Americans learning about slavery or treatment of native populations, Germans learning about Nazism, or the Japanese learning about WW2 atrocities. If the next generation ought feel zero guilt about the past, then the right way to do this is to relegate racial history to graduate studies or strike it from history altogether. Historical atrocities are a serious affront to national pride. Part of why Shinzo Abe was so controversial was because he wanted to strike some matters from history; this is a thing at least because of a shared acute sense of pain that results from this knowledge. I think this is also part of why race in school curriculum is such a big deal right now in conservative politics. The magnitude of "white guilt" surely cannot be because Democrats are talking about it on CNN; it's because every child learns about it in school. There's no cure for this pain quite like not knowing at all.