Are history curricula too patriotic?

Do history curricula put undue emphasis on your country's history?

At least in the United States, this seems to be a systemic problem. Since the US isn't a nation-state, I think it's particularly egregious. Kids tend to only learn one part of broad social movements that encompassed, at minimum, all English-speaking people. You can't understand the Puritan settlers without a strong grasp of the issues in the English Civil War. American abolitionism and our Civil War were just one part of a religious and sociopolitical discourse that swept the English-speaking world and beyond in the 19th century. So why teach our children parochially?

Time, money, et cetera. You can only throw so much into a regular high school history class, so I guess they figured they'd fit in as many of the important blocks as they could realistically do.

That being said, I wish most Americans were taught Geography. Geography-For-Americans appears to strictly be which countries we've blown shit up in lately, countries we hate, and countries we like or tolerate.

Pretty sure my history was pretty Britain-centric. World War II blitz evacuees in Year Four, Roman invasion of Britain in Year Five... that's all I can remember from Primary School. Then Norman invasion of Britain for most of Year Seven, Tudor Britain in Year 8, and then "wider world" in Year Nine (mostly WWII/Cold War).

GCSE History has pretty much no Britain in it, though

Unrelated, but I've had several people I've talked to online assume that Wales is a town in England. Gah.

edited 22nd Apr '11 11:07:33 AM by AllanAssiduity

@Barkey: That's part of it. However, that doesn't excuse blatant lies or lies of omission.

I didn't even hear about the War of 1812 until college, and throughout my primary education, I was told that the US had never lost a war.

Granted, I was homeschooled during the period in which kids usually start learning about that stuff, but it never came up in high school either.

The big criticism of history as taught in UK schools tends to be quite the reverse - that it doesn't give pupils a clear idea of the sweep of British history, just a series of random disconnected episodes and concentrates too much on "politically correct" topics like slavery (YMMV - Britain was hugely involved in the slave trade and its consequences, so it is pretty important).

Barkey's post reminds me of 1066 and All That, a book I've mentioned before which is basically a 1930s send-up of old-fashioned patriotic history British-style. It too, is essentially about how Britain blew up shit in a lot of other countries that we liked or hated on our way to imperial "glory", but as written by posh Englishmen 70 years ago. I have clearly now become its pimp.

edited 22nd Apr '11 11:18:03 AM by captainbrass2

God, yes. We barely learned anything about anything that wasn't American back when I was in school, and everything American was heavily idealized to the point of uselessness for figuring out why events really happened.

America isn't the only country that does this, of course... I believe Japan still has its issues in that area as well, for example... but given the sheer amount of diversity the country holds within its borders, it really is amazing how LITTLE diversity there is in the textbooks.

I blame Texas. ;)

There's far too much history to study everything. However I do agree that they tend to be a bit too focused for my tastes. Classes tend to have some kind of thesis that they want to present to the students in the form of a series of examples. While that's all well and good when you're in college studying a particular aspect of history, in the kind of general survey classes in that happen in high school or earlier it can give a heavily skewed picture of the world to the students.

I can't recall ever having a world history class until 10th grade AP World History (In which we covered every major historical episode from the Mesopotamian River Valley to the War on Terror, it was glorious).

While we dealt with a lot of national history in my school, we spent almost as much, if not more, on world history, from ancient times to modernity. Granted, all the war coverage was always national-centric to the point where even when we were the wrong side (the Crimea War, for example, or Afghanistan) or it was muddy as heck (the Russo-Finnish war, the Korean War) were pro-national, but that's patriotism for you.

I agree for once.

My history courses pre-college were too wrapepd up in "america did all this awesome shit. and Paul revere was awesome (and definitely didnt have 11 other riders with him). and George washington never told a lie. and the Boston massacre totally happened. and the Trail of tears...well lets gloss over that yep"

edited 22nd Apr '11 11:43:28 AM by Midgetsnowman

Here is a summary of my history courses.

Michigan History, Revolutionary War, Michigan History, American Prehistory (How the pilgrims were so nice to the Indians! And Puritans just wanted religious freedom!) Revolutionary War and Events after Revolutionary War, Civil War

High School: Early Human History, American History from Civil War to Cuban Missile Crisis, Medieval World History.

Yeah, it was pretty lousy, High School was a bit better though. I was surprised how much Medieval World was about the middle east, and this was during the time when the middle east was REALLY unpopular.

Yep, the only native american history I learned was the fucking thanksgiving dinner.

edited 22nd Apr '11 11:44:51 AM by Thorn14

Hoo boy. I grew up in Oklahoma, formerly known as Indian Territory. We treated the Land Run as the most awesomest thing ever, even down to getting the little kids in elementary school to dress up, grab a sack lunch, and "stake our claim" on the playground.

Looking back, I'm not sure what to think about that.

^^ Heh. My classes also conveniently glossed over why the "Intolerable Acts" happened.

And glossed over how Benedict Arnold was a goddamned hero for most of the war and a brilliant general.

and practically tried to pretend France's only contribution to the war was sending the Marquis to be Washington's sidekick.

edited 22nd Apr '11 11:49:14 AM by Midgetsnowman

Basically, we heard the same few idealized stories over and over again until 10th grade, where they gave us a decently accurate American history.

I remember being surprised at how dickish we were during the whole Cuban revolution thing.

here in Missouri, you dont stop hearing the idealized crap until you take a college history course.

Somehow I suspect given how many people around my town never make it to college, I'd imagine this is why so many of them have such an idiotically patriotic stance on fucking everything.

edited 22nd Apr '11 11:54:41 AM by Midgetsnowman

Here in Hungary, we had Hungarian and global history going parallel in high school. When we studied a time frame when Hungary existed, half of the lessons were about Hungary, and the other half about global history.

First year was entirely about ancient mediterran history, second year was medieval Europe, with about half of the lessons about medieval Hungary, third year was early modern history in the same way, with 2 lessons thrown in about the USA, and fourth year was 20th century, again, with half of it about Hungary, the rest about global (actually global) history.

Of course it's quite biased, about how awesome we were for conquering a chunk of Middle-Europe for ourselves in year 2, and how evil everyone else was for repeatedly conquering us in years 3 and 4, but really, it could be a lot worse, for such a nationalistic country.

edited 22nd Apr '11 12:04:00 PM by EternalSeptember

Wow, you actually learn about USA history?

Thats surprising.

Patriotic is one thing, but I think there's a concern with a limited scope, or a national focus, or even a local focus.

I can see why you'd wanna limit ascope with kids. The problem is theres a difference between "limited scope" and "edit out all the inconvenient details. paint a highly idealized picture, and make kids memorize dates and names of minor american celebrities like Paul Revere rather than concentrate on why the goddamn american revolution happened to begin with and how it affected the rest of the world"

Half the problem i think is people are seriously nEVER told that wars affect people outside the warring countries. The first time i ever remember hearing about anything that happened in europe related to the american revolution was college . Highschool woulda had me believe that the war essentially was heroic americans kicking ass with a couple of sidekicks and nothing else.

The current government wishes to modify the history curriculum to be more celebratory of Britain's history, which strikes me as more than a little bit silly. As to my own experience of it growing up, my school for some reason decided to teach pre-history (as in, the frigging dinosaurs) before moving into the history of 11th century England. That was when I was very young. There's a big blank between that and GCSE level.

From what I remember (omitting huge chunks lost to memory) GCSE history was primarily First World War and the Blitz. A-level history was the changing nature of warfare 1789-1945 and a mini-dissertation on a topic of our choice (mine being Soviet Marshal Georgi Zhukov).

I moved to America as a teenager and when I attended the high school, I was pretty amused to see that the textbook covering 2000 years of world history was half the size of the textbook covering 300 years of American history.

I'm pretty sure that most countries have most of their history lessons focus around their own history, which is really the way it should be. History taught to children needs to be relevant to how it eventually went on to produce the society they live in. Of course this is completely seperate to how patriotic the course is.

There is a lot of History world wide that I wish I had been taught, but there's not much that I think should be replaced either. Henry VIII's wives need to be removed from primary schools though, because it only has any real meaning if taught in a wider contextof how the change to religon affected the country.

Probably true of Ireland; wherein a huge part of the course concerns Irish history, both modern and past (and by necessity, English history). It later expands to encompass aspects of American and European history, however.

Partly justified insofar as the importance of maintaining what's left of the culture is particularly keenly felt by many here.

Around here, when I was at school, it was like from Antiquity to XX Century in primary, then The Same But More in junior high, and then, in high, well... you can guess. I remember, only in high we've actually got to theNineties before the summer holidays began.

edit: after the Antiquity ended, most of that was local history. It went like that: some political history, then a lesson on the culture of the period and such matters, and then we went on to next. The affairs abroad were either some important event, or involving us in some way. For example I've learned of the War of Spanish Succession from the 'Net.

edited 22nd Apr '11 2:13:23 PM by lordGacek