Should "real" history be taught to younger students?
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you mean the germanic feudal period? between the 300s AD and the first crusade in the 1100s AD. love that period. funny how the greek dark age is rarely mentioned.Spaceman_Spiff said:
i'll admit at first i thought this topic would be talking about the fact that sex is completly left out as a motivation for political actions.
lets see, japanese-american internment camps are not taught in order to frame the americans as 'the good guys' in WWII. any sort of womens rights, minority rights, and their respective artistic achievemnts are all added in an attempt to overturn the view of history as being about 'old white men', inspite of the fact that most of the major, non-scientific, achievements of history were actually made by middle-aged white men. that if we really want to show influential historical women, we have to teach a certain amount of sex history. and that if we want to talk about minorities we have to talk about how we, white people, persecuted even each other. or for that matter how the US was one of the last english speaking nations to abolish slavery, which is hardly a patriotic topic.
we should talk about how theoretical any history is, how religion had less of an influence on the crusades then most people believe, how instrumental christianity was in the abolishment of slavery(inspite of present views of a bigoted church), and of course how the winner writes the history book causing strong bias in any war. i feel really awful about whats happened to germany since WWII, they had a great national anthem and you can't even play it now.
It has less to do with teachers not wanting to teach it and more to do with
A) Not having enough time to go in depth and explain all these things correctly to children and
B) Children themselves not being able to understand a lot of the complicated concepts we learn later on.
So it's not really that we're lied to...it's just we're fed the basic of basics until we can delve deeper into the subject matter. Even then chances are you won't learn most things until college anyways. I know I never got past the second World War in my high school history classes and the only reason we even get that far is because we skip over tons of stuff, jumping from early civilizations, to greeks/romans, to the "dark" ages, to colonial America, etc, etc.
Edit: And it's certainly not some conspiracy or whatever bs some people in this thread are talking about.
A) Not having enough time to go in depth and explain all these things correctly to children and
B) Children themselves not being able to understand a lot of the complicated concepts we learn later on.
So it's not really that we're lied to...it's just we're fed the basic of basics until we can delve deeper into the subject matter. Even then chances are you won't learn most things until college anyways. I know I never got past the second World War in my high school history classes and the only reason we even get that far is because we skip over tons of stuff, jumping from early civilizations, to greeks/romans, to the "dark" ages, to colonial America, etc, etc.
Edit: And it's certainly not some conspiracy or whatever bs some people in this thread are talking about.
You shouldn't go around making sweeping generalizations like that. Just because YOU weren't taught stuff by your teachers doesn't mean the entire country is in on some conspiracy to not teach these things. I learned about these two facts specifically in my 7th grade world history class, so yeah...stonethered said:
Easy answer. Don't teach them about anything where you would have to make that choice at first, and than work your way up. Got it?
We go into more detail later on. Are they supposed to tell them that 'every single child and woman was raped'and say how 'Their privates were cut off and put in their mouth'? They won't get it and may be frightened
It's only becuase it's refered to as the Dark Ages, as if the rest of the world became non existant when Rome "fell". I mean some of the largest leaps in medicine happened in the muslim and chinese civilisations but that is always left out in history classes in schools.stonethered said:
YES!
It is ridiculous, completely, to sugar coat your own history. Let us face it, that is really what is happening here. After all people learn, for example, how bad the genocide inspired conditions where in Japanese and German internment camps at a young age. Clearly this alone shows we are not trying to 'protect the children' from disturbing history.
The things we are not teaching our young teens are things that will paint our own countries in 'negative ways.' We seem to want to teach our teens that they live in a good and noble place, and likely the 'only' good and noble place on earth. They don't want our teens to realise the truth, that every single country out there has a shameful past it must strive to over come. Much easier to give them some fairy tale about how they live in the only 'free and pure' nation on earth....
This of course leads to the inclination to view every other nation as 'less then human,' in case your wondering where those brain dead war supporters are coming from... now you know.
As an Australian I never learned about the stolen generation in school, not even classes dedicated Australian history. Hell we never even touched on Aboriginal beliefs, history or anything else that wasn't some violent clashing between the native and the immigrants. Maybe we would have less anti-aboriginal sentiments if we actually taught our kids about their ways at a earlier age.
It is ridiculous, completely, to sugar coat your own history. Let us face it, that is really what is happening here. After all people learn, for example, how bad the genocide inspired conditions where in Japanese and German internment camps at a young age. Clearly this alone shows we are not trying to 'protect the children' from disturbing history.
The things we are not teaching our young teens are things that will paint our own countries in 'negative ways.' We seem to want to teach our teens that they live in a good and noble place, and likely the 'only' good and noble place on earth. They don't want our teens to realise the truth, that every single country out there has a shameful past it must strive to over come. Much easier to give them some fairy tale about how they live in the only 'free and pure' nation on earth....
This of course leads to the inclination to view every other nation as 'less then human,' in case your wondering where those brain dead war supporters are coming from... now you know.
As an Australian I never learned about the stolen generation in school, not even classes dedicated Australian history. Hell we never even touched on Aboriginal beliefs, history or anything else that wasn't some violent clashing between the native and the immigrants. Maybe we would have less anti-aboriginal sentiments if we actually taught our kids about their ways at a earlier age.
When you're a child you have a very limited sence of scale. Nobody gives a damn about voting untill you know how the Government is effecting you, and for that you either need the news to bark it at you or an already active interest in party policy. However children would rather watch cartoons than a man in a suit talk facts for upwards of half an hour. Around 10 you can't imagine the implications of Genocide, let alone spell it. It's all about gradually building things up towards the bigger picture. Another Nazi example, everyone knew Hitler was a bad man and the Nazis were evil. But only much later can you bring in the more philosphical ideas such as the Nuremburg Trials, and they couldn't imagine the scale of 6,000,000 people being wiped out for thier choice of lifestyle.
more often i have found that history was poorly taught becuase the textbook was out of date and the information proven already top be inacurrate. The education system seems to not care about this setting and marking assignments without any real regard to PROVEN FACTS.
Good post. I think yes, kids should be taught the truth behind everything. However to expect them to comprehend it would be a difficult task. The best thing to do would be to balance it. If you're going to emphasize the evils, then the good needs to be emphasized as well. Personally I think they do this to create a sense of denial and lingering patriotism that always niggles at their brains whenever they question something. It happens to me, even when the facts point to me being right.
You know to be fair textbooks, period, become out of date within a year. With most countries school budgets how they are getting up to date textbooks for all subjects every year is impossible; hence, we end up with 5 or 6 year old textbooks in schools that are terribly out of date, but unless budgets change it's not really the school systems fault.Kron_the_mad said:
yea, chinese history is really neglected here in america. japan i have a limited understanding in just because i took an interest.Spaceman_Spiff said:
islamic history i know because i've pretty much written my college thesis on it. i believe the last textbook i read on the subject had three paragraphs leading up to the crusades.
since the escapist is primarily focused on video games i feel like it ought to be mentioned that age of empires 2 had one of the most historically acurate campaign series in the history of gaming, all heroes are real historical heroes, all cutscenes are historically accurate, and the main cheat code is an awesome looking though somewhat underpowered(in-game) car.
yes, yes you should. obviously don't go into gory details, e.g. how mengele butchered people and vivisected babies, but tell them the hard truth even if it's sad or upsetting because history can be sad and upsetting.
You don't have to be wise to comprehend politics, sure, you probably havn't been taught enough to understand it in a complex manor, but he's asking if we should withhold information to make history more 'cushey' for our children. I think that usually makes them insanely patriotic, which isn't good for creating an individualistic society.Monshroud said:
Nope, I just taught myself after school. That's how I know how the other countries see it.Xvito said:
