My first college class was literally called “The World since 1945”. It was taught by an expert on right wing extremism.

the bizarre thing is I remember skipping ahead in history books in school and they had sections on the 70’s onward and I was always wondering why we stopped at WW2

i remember skipping ahead in a later edition of textbook and seeing Obama and desert camo US soldiers lol

US history education is not the only thing that sucks. The only thing I remember from history education in the Danish school system is:

• Vikings (cool)
• Knights (they lived in castles)
• King Christian IV built a lot of pretty buildings
• Something about the French Revolution that was actually quite decent
• WWII, the Germans started it because they wanted to kill all Jews. Then they occupied Denmark and you couldn’t get coffee any more. Luckily the resistance movement (they were nationalists who loved liberal democracy, the word “communist” was never spoken) won with help from the British and the Americans.

And that’s about it. Nothing about the social upheavals of industrialisation, not a single word about labour history or colonialism or whatever happened outside of Denmark or Europe. Not a single word about the revolutions in Russia, Germany, China, Cuba or anywhere else. Not even anything about the very significant, and at times violent, struggle between conservative estate owners and liberal peasants in the 1800’s that was extremely formative for Danish society. Nothing about how for centuries imbecile elites led the nation into one catastrophic war after the other.

Liberal-conservative history education is a tool of indoctrination that actively constructs a mirage of a single unified nation, bound together by lofty patriotic sentiments.

Exactly, yeah.

My experience is a little different because I went through the UK school system with its own set of idiosyncrasies but the same general lack of education on stuff that’s like, actually important to understanding why the world is the way it is. I suppose they might think it’s too “traumatic” for teenagers to learn about but, like, we’re already taught that the Holocaust happened and that’s basically peak trauma on a population if you’re looking at anything in the last hundred years or so.

It’s been a while, but I was taught like… Romans (but not really the big picture, at least I never internalized it - it was news to me when I learned that there was three phases of Roman history from Mike Duncan and it wasn’t just ‘Julius Caeser comes out of the historical ether and invents the Roman Empire, and… look at how cool that Roman military equipment is!’), the Middle Ages in England specifically and maybe Europe generally, with absolutely nothing east of fucking Germany), the Great Fire of London, a bit of WW1, a fair amount of WW2, and then that was more or less where it stopped. Everything after that was treated as “and you know the rest!” - I absolutely did not know the rest and had to teach myself it. And also relearn most of the history I was already taught apart from the broadest strokes. And I don’t even necessarily disagree that these subjects weren’t important to learn, it’s just it wasn’t done very well, and it didn’t cover much of the more recent history that would be important for people alive today to learn. Sure, WW2 wasn’t that long ago, but so much has happened between then and now that you can’t really extrapolate that much if you knew nothing about the events between then and now other than what the media has told you.

And I was pretty interested in history and would have gone forward with it if I didn’t already know that it was a fairly dead-end career path, I would hate to see the average knowledge that somebody who didn’t give a shit about any of it. Sometimes I’m like “Wow, I don’t know fucking anything about history, I couldn’t tell you much about the Korean War or Middle Eastern history or ancient civilizations or the history of European rulers and kingdoms” but then I see somebody (either irl or in the dunk tank or similar places) with such a horrifyingly idiotic take on history that I suddenly feel quite good about myself.