history and what people don't know

[Katze]

Chickadilly5 at aol.com wrote:

> Another example, not really related to race but equally
> mind blowing (to me anyway) was when a girl came to ask me if we had a book
> entitled, "At dawn we slept."  This is a rather famous book about the bombing
> of Pearl Harbor.  I told her I knew we had it in stock (I had just shelved it
> that morning) and that she could find it in the history section under World
> War 2.  She looked at me blankly and asked why it was put there.  I explained
> it was about Pearl Harbor and her response was, "Ohhhh!  Ok, just 'cuz I saw
> that in some movie and thought it was made up for the movie."  I just stood
> there and in my shock couldn't think of anything to say in response.

This is actually quite sad...and reminds me of my experience in
Highschool (early 90's). During my 11th grade history class (I think it
ws 11th), we spent only 2 weeks on World War II. The thing that gets me,
and irritates me, is that we spend 1st grade through 10th grade learning
about the founding of the country. How many times to we really need to
hear about it? Not that it's not important, but there's more to our
country and world than the first 100 years. We could even explore more
the social effects of the first 100 years, but instead we just learn
dates of documents, and birthrates of the presidents. We learned names
of famous Black people like Rosa Parks (at least I knew that one!), and
MLK, but we never went into depth discussing the social implications of
slavery, and there was never any deep discussions about the Black's
struggle during MLK's civil rights movements, and the years following.
We never discussed the implications from World War II, and how those
generations were were affected. I know that Jews were killed, and Hitler
was a bad guy, but we never went into depth discussing what happened to
the countries who took in the Jews when they fled Germany, and there
were many effects come to find out! 

We finally started learning things about the Industrial revolution
towards the end of 10th grade (IIRC), and moved forward from there and
then we got world history in 12th grade (which consisted of chatting
with our friends and watching movies like Spartacus - I'm sure Gladiator
would have been a big hit!). The school system spent very little time on
any other era besides the first 100 years our history (maybe a few weeks
here and there). It's sorely disappointing. 
I guess you could argue that discussing social implications isn't
history...since many people believe that history is more like learning
dates.

I look back at my history classes, and I really cannot tell you anything
that I learned (no wait..I remember learning what blitzkrieg means). The
history that I know, I've learned outside of school, by watching
documentaries or reading books.

Ok...enough of my rant...
-Katze