@drwho @irene @DeliaChristina seriously? wow. I had WWII covered at length in multiple history classes in california public schools, plus required reading pertaining to the holocaust in english classes. I was in school in the 90s and 00's
@gwenverbsnouns @drwho @DeliaChristina yeah we were taught in elementary school about the holocaust because we read the diaries of Anne Frank.
Oct 4, 2026, 9:19 PM@irene @gwenverbsnouns @DeliaChristina We read it in eighth grade (after one or two families tried to get the book banned and got their hands slapped soundly), but that was pretty much it. Nothing in the way of actual history talked about it.
@drwho Those families were probably nazis then, if you try to prevent people from learning about something bad that happened you probably want it to happen again @irene @gwenverbsnouns @DeliaChristina
Oct 5, 2026, 3:33 PM@sackofbones @irene @gwenverbsnouns @DeliaChristina With all the stuff that's happened since then? It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest.
Oct 5, 2026, 3:25 PM@gwenverbsnouns @irene @DeliaChristina Seriously. I am not kidding.
I bring this up because it explains a great deal, vis a vis, some of how the US got into the fix it's in right now. When folks don't know what happened, they don't know it can happen again. And they don't know how to recognize when it starts all over again.
I suspect that for many, Nazis and World War II were this sort of backdrop thing in popular culture (i.e., Indiana Jones movies) and not Big History.
Oct 5, 2026, 3:26 PM@gwenverbsnouns @irene @DeliaChristina I was class of '96 in southwestern PA. _The Diary of Anne Frank_ was eighth grade English class for us in 1992, followed by _Johnny Tremaine_.
Oct 9, 2026, 10:40 PM@irene @drwho @DeliaChristina @gwenverbsnouns sorry to break it to you but I have not found that any grade school curriculum in the USA covers the geography, let alone the history of any other country in any depth. The inward focus of their education system is an abomination imho.
@Rickd6 @irene @drwho @DeliaChristina that's pretty true. there's some in world history for the part of the Western world which predates the US, but other than that we really only cover international events and places when the US is directly involved (and even that is through a heavily nationalistic lense)
probably the closest we get is in language classes, but it's still pretty shallow. like memorizing national capitols in south america for a spanish class
@gwenverbsnouns @Rickd6 @drwho @DeliaChristina in fourth grade, we memorized all the provinces/states and capitals of Canada and Mexico and all the countries and capitals of the other continents. Not sure how that was useful though ..
Oct 12, 2026, 3:15 PM@DeliaChristina @irene @gwenverbsnouns @drwho it wasn’t really but was easy to test. Knowing the people, the life circumstances or anything relatable is more difficult to test, but much more useful to life. Education as a business is simplistic rhetoric and memorizing.
Oct 12, 2026, 5:03 PM@Rickd6 @DeliaChristina @irene @gwenverbsnouns Especially if you're being educated to fulfill a specific role in a specific kind of environment.
Oct 13, 2026, 1:33 PM@drwho @DeliaChristina @irene @gwenverbsnouns that’s called job training not education- and should be fully funded by corporations not government.