[carguy1983]

Honest question. I'm not white ; do many white people in America really truly believe high school history as it is taught?

i.e that white people invented absolutely everything and Europe is the only old world with history worth studying? Then again maybe it's changed in the past 15 years?

[psykotic]

That's not an honest question--you are being fatuous. Every culture suffers from this to a very large degree. It's easy to give examples drawn from parts of the world where printing presses predated European inventions. The traditionally taught dynastic histories of China go back thousands of years beyond where there is any credible archeological evidence of a civilization in continuity with later Han culture. Koreans are similarly taught that their civilization has a 5000-year history based on nothing other than latter-day textual sources to support the deeper part of its antiquity.

[ForrestN]

The fact that non-white cultures also distort their youths' understanding of history to their own benefit isn't a valid argument for Americans to continue to do so. And it isn't a valid argument against skepticism on the part of students.

[psykotic]

Clearly. The point is that this isn't some white thing. It's a universal flaw of human cultures that has resulted in much ignorance and atrocity throughout history.

[ForrestN]

I don't think the parent claimed that it is "some white thing" in the sense that this phenomenon only applies to white cultures. Instead, he was referring to the topic of discussion here, namely an example of white culture perpetrating this mistake.

[learc83]

From your username, I'm guessing you were born in 1983; I was too. There's a huge variety in American education so it's possible our experiences were completely different.

However, when I was in high school our textbooks were so concerned with political correctness that if anything they were overly focussed on diversity.

I took AP US history, World History, Asian History, and AP European History. The Average student only got one section of European history in the overall World History class.

>that white people invented absolutely everything and Europe is the only old world with history worth studying? Then again maybe it's changed in the past 15 years?

I find it very hard to believe (not impossible, just very unlikely) that you were actually taught that. More likely you just saw your history classes through your own biases.

[forgottenpaswrd]

I am not American so I could not talk for them, but in Europe nobody teaches that white people invented everything.

E.g everybody knows when he studies history what this article says along the invention of the compass and gears and zero and algebra in Asia.

But people from western countries invented almost everything since the Guttemberg press, maybe because of this press, as books became hundreds or thousand of times cheaper that what they were before and Asian countries had to face an obsolete language with thousand of characters (Japanese realised they had such and inferior language and created higajana and katakana later).

Knowledge spread so fast other places could not compete. It has nothing to do with the color of your skin.

[meric]

I wouldn't say Chinese is "obsolete". Written chinese does not convey pronunciation at all and therefore changes very slowly compared to spoken chinese. That meant even though chinese people from different regions of china couldn't always communicate using spoken chinese because of language divergence they could communicate by writing. I think this has had an effect on the unity of China - over thousands of years it stayed as a single nation; in comparison the Europe where many languages have diverged from Latin and where there are many nation-states where people are bound together by their language.

If China was not united during the incursions by European countries in the 1800's, maybe they'd have ended up even worse off.

With today's technology, would you say Chinese is now un-obsoleted?

[learc83]

I wouldn't say modern technology has completely erased the disadvantages of written Chinese. When I was taking Mandarin in college the typing system seemed like a rather inelegant hack.

[kylebrown]

I thnk the modern technology the parent refers to is touch screens for writing chinese characters, not keyboards for typing pinyin.

[adrusi]

The way we are taught in america is that nothing happens outside of america. I am a high school sophomore and so far I have had to site through 5 years of American History classes, and no World History classes. In these classes we learn about the contributions of blacks to society, and in more recent history, the contributions of other races, but hardly anything about other countries unless we were at war with them.

We're taught as if there is a concrete separation between American History and World History, when in fact, teaching America separately means artificially separating it from the rest of the world and having to constantly compensate for that.

[learc83]

You're telling me you've never learned about Ancient Greece, Ancient Egypt, China, Medieval Europe?

I find that very unlikely. If it is true please don't go around making statements like we are taught in america is that nothing happens outside of america.

You can't speak for America as a whole since we don't have a national curriculum.

More than likely you just feel the way you do because you just took US history and haven't gotten to any or the world history classes.

>We're taught as if there is a concrete separation between American History and World History,

There's nothing wrong with teaching a separate US history and world History class. When you get to college you'll find that history classes are even further subdivided by time and geography.

[adrusi]

The only time I was ever taught about ancient greece, egypt, china, etc was in third grade, and I hardly think that counts. I've gone to school in three different states, so I have at least some reasonable sample of nation, and although there is no national curriculum, the curricula are generally similar enough.

And college history courses assume that you already have enough knowledge from high school history courses to understand the historical context of what they teach, but by teaching American history separate (and before) world history, we are not taught any global context for events in American History.

[learc83]

>The only time I was ever taught about ancient greece, egypt, china, etc was in third grade, and I hardly think that counts.

If that's true you are an extremely rare case. I just took a look at the social studies standards for my state (Georgia, not exactly a top performer education wise) for middle schoool.

6th grade is the history and geography of Latin America, the Caribbean, Canada, Europe and Australia, 7th is Africa, Southwest Asia (Middle East), Southern and Eastern Asia, and 8th is US/Georgia History.

If you really haven't had any world history since 3rd grade it looks like it may have been a consequence of moving between 3 states.

If each state had world history at a different year in their curriculum, you may have missed them entirely.

Please don't try to speak for America on a forum with an international audience. Your experience is not representative.

[Duff]

Perhaps you are stuck in some weird loop due to attending school in different states, or have attended really lousy schools.

When i was in elementary school in NYC, we learned about ancient civilizations and NYC history in 4th grade -- the ancient part was kicked off with a field trip to the Egyptian artifacts at the Met.

In high school in upstate ny, we studied global history and current events from grade 9 through 11. The Chinese portion sucked -- we basically covered the opium wars though the cultural revolution, but we studied many aspects of global history.

[kevinnk]

In my state (Michigan) world history is a state wide requirement, so the first part of your comment is absolutely wrong. And I can't talk about any other schools, but the school I attended (a large, public, middle of the road high school) did a very good job of incorporating US history into a broader world perspective. If you've had a bad high school experience, please do not generalize to the entirety of the US.