History classes at school

[Kersenne]

Hi everyone! 

 

I hope I'm posting this in the right place

 

I've always wondered what other people studied in their history classes around the world.

 

In France, for instance, we talk a lot about our history (the fact that we're the country of Human Rights, that we beheaded our king, that we once were the greatest Empire in Europe, blablabla), but the strongest focus of our history curriculum is World War 1 and World War 2. From primary school till high school, there hasn't a year where we didn't talk about it. We also had classes about Roman and Greek Empires, about colonization, about  America and Russia, about the Cold War, and so on.

 

So what's it like where you're from? What did you learn during your history classes? 

[Eureka. Immense.]

Western Civ, World War 1 & 2 , American Revolutionary War, American Civil War, Vietnam War, Korean War..... I just remember a lot about wars in high school.

 

I had a neat teacher once that focused on human rights and Latin American history. We ditched the state mandated history books one year and watched a lot of documentaries and started an amnesty international club.

[Kersenne]

3 minutes ago, Eureka. Immense. said:

Western Civ, World War 1 & 2 , American Revolutionary War, American Civil War, Vietnam War, Korean War..... I just remember a lot about wars in high school.

 

I had a neat teacher once that focused on human rights and Latin American history. We ditched the state mandated history books one year and watched a lot of documentaries and started an amnesty international club.

Now that you mention it.... indeed, it looks like our History is only about wars! How sad... I liked learning about Greek Gods better, even if they were waging wars against each other. At least I could imagine it was only fictional. But if war is such an important part of our History and life, then perhaps we'll never ever have peace in the world  Oooh that's such a negative way of thinking... 

 

I've never had Latin American history classes. Is it about Mexico and central America? that must be quite interesting as well. Did you learn about Mayas and Incas and such? Did you have classes about Native Americans' history? 

[Eureka. Immense.]

11 minutes ago, Kersenne said:

Is it about Mexico and central America? that must be quite interesting as well. Did you learn about Mayas and Incas and such? Did you have classes about Native Americans' history? 

Yeah it was a bit about Mexico, central america and south america-- and a bit about Native Americans. Mayas and incas I think we covered in Elementary school with Egyptians and the Greeks and Romans as well... mythology and the like. Honestly it's all a blur. That's public school in a small country town for yah. I really enjoyed learning about latin American history and culture so I ended up taking some  latin american film classes at Uni.

 

I'm actually quite interested in how war has evolved over the ages-- at one point in time we could set aside our squabbles for a time out, so to speak... but now I just feel like we have so much hatred towards each other and dehumanize each other and the methods in which we kill are so much more profound in their scale.... so on some level I totally feel you about "never having peace in the world."

[Starry Sky]

In the US, at least in my history classes, we pretty much focus on wars, slavery & segregation, and presidents. :/ 

[Kersenne]

5 minutes ago, Starry Sky said:

In the US, at least in my history classes, we pretty much focus on wars, slavery & segregation, and presidents. :/ 

I can imagine how slavery & segregation are important topics in the US. I remember having classes about this as well, but it was in a special class called english history, so not part of the main curriculum. Do you feel that history classes help you understand teh actual world better? 

[Starry Sky]

9 minutes ago, Kersenne said:

I can imagine how slavery & segregation are important topics in the US. I remember having classes about this as well, but it was in a special class called english history, so not part of the main curriculum. Do you feel that history classes help you understand teh actual world better? 

Not really. Occasionally, topics will open up discussion amongst different viewpoints and that's the most valuable thing I get out of history classes, seeing how other people view and interpret the world. Such open discussions are often very brief as we quickly move on to other things because it's a bit "taboo" to really go in depth about the emotions and reasoning that influenced our history and even shape us today. I'm more of a visual learner so the nature of history classes being mostly straight up information of names, dates, facts, and stories, isn't really stuff that I can grasp and understand and connect to the world and society. 

[Yatogami]

World history doesn't exist in America, other than talking about WW1&2.  That we won. We win all the wars.

[Scucca9]

I remember doing a LOT of World War I and II, we did some stuff on the English Civil War (complete with a textbook with Oliver Cromwell's desiccated head on the front cover!), segregation and slavery in America, the Tudors, the Battle of Hastings, and when I was cleaning out my room, I found a booklet I'd made about 9th-century Baghdad, so we must've covered the Middle East in the early medieval period at some point. Oh, and the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution. In primary school (elementary school) we did Ancient Egypt, the Vikings, Ancient Greece, and the Romans in Britain. And World War II and the Tudors.

I *think* we also covered the British Empire at some point. 
 

So yeah, that's a rough idea of UK history lessons.

[Kersenne]

So it seems we all dig in BC history in primary school and afterwards, it's mostly about world wars. That's interesting. 

And it's also very focused on one country's history, which makes sense! 

 

I wish we had more classes about prehistory and dinosaurs, for instance... We briefly talked about it in primary school but not anymore afterwards, which is a pity  

 

@Yato America didn't win WW1&2, they only helped the winners  Well ok, let's say the Allies won (and the USA only entered the war pretty late)

[Grumpy Alien]

I’m American and we studied almost exclusively US history (mostly just politics and laws) until high school - ages 14-18. I don’t recall ever focusing much on anything outside of the US before high school. In high school, I had:

9th grade: US history

10th grade: US history

11th grade: World history (nothing ancient - only about 1700 and after)

12th grade: Holocausts (elective class) and modern US history (elective class)

 

I never studied ancient history in school unless you count how we learned about dinosaurs in 3rd grade.

[Philip027]

I don't really remember, because I didn't really care.  Tell me something interesting about people that are still actually alive maybe, not people that have been dead for a century or more.

[danvers]

I'm from California in the US.

 

We learned about the history of our town/area in 3rd grade, California (mostly the Gold Rush) in 4th grade, and the US in 5th grade. I don't remember much detail about elementary school history.

 

6th grade was ancient history (a little on human evolution, then Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome). 7th grade was world history. I know we talked about Persia and about Cortez and the  Aztecs, but I don't really remember what else we learned about. 8th grade was US history again, with a big emphasis on the Civil War because my teacher loved Abraham Lincoln. I think we went up to the early 21st century in that class, but everything after the Civil War was kind of rushed and not talked about in detail. There was also this thing called History Day, which was basically a HUGE, long-term history project (individual or group) that involved lots of research and primary sources. All 8th graders had to do it, and since I took honors history, I had to do it in 7th grade, too. In 7th grade, my project was on Malinche, an Aztec woman who worked as Cortez's translator, and in 8th grade, I worked with a friend on a project about the history of American national parks. High school students can do it, too, but I didn't continue after middle school.

 

In 9th grade, I took social science, so we looked at different regions of the world and focused a lot on culture, not just history. We got extra credit if we brought in food from the culture we were studying! In 10th grade, I took AP European History. We started in the Middle Ages and were supposed to cover everything up to the present day, but we didn't cover anything after WWII very well. In 11th grade, I took AP US History, and that's the first class that helped me really understand more recent history, after WWII. The thing about AP classes is that they're supposed to prepare you to take the AP test for that subject (big, long test with multiple choice, short answer, and essay questions. Actual, multi-paragraph essays, not just multiple sentences. If you do well enough, you can get college credit for those classes and/or place out of  similar intro classes in college), so they don't necessarily match how your school teaches regular classes in that subject. My AP history classes were very focused on patterns and the effects of different events and movements on later history, with less focus on memorizing dates, but I don't  know if the regular history classes at my high school were like that.

 

I didn't take a history class in 12th grade, but now I'm taking a college history class called "The American Peoples up to 1865." It's really interesting because it's focused more on people and how they influenced and were affected by historical events than on the historical events themselves. My professor also makes a point to include the perspectives of women and people of color, who tend to get overlooked and/or erased when people study history.

[fuzzipueo]

It's been long enough I don't remember what exactly we studied in grade school for history, except for some highlights like learning Hawaiian history when my dad got transferred to Hickam Air Force Base when I was a kid. That was cool. We did field trips and an away camp to learn about how the islanders lived.

 

In Illinois, the classes focused on Illinois history and we were encouraged to visit the a pioneer's day festival held at a place called Echert's Farm. Great fun.

 

History classes here in NM for some reason escape my memory - most of what I know about New Mexico history I picked up when I went to college. High school was all about US and World History - though not in any real depth. We, like a lot of folks here have said, didn't get much beyond WWII and not even in to the Civil Rights Movement, Korea or Vietnam (a war we did not win and should not have been in), mostly due to time constraints. Most of what I've learned over the years has come from college and university classes (I have a BA in history - for what it's worth), and from watching such excellent shows as American Experience, just about anything by Ken Burns, and other such note worthy shows on PBS, or from just picking up well written history books and reading on my own.

[Mostly Peaceful Ryan]

6 hours ago, Kersenne said:

the fact that we're the country of Human Rights, that we beheaded our king

This combo back to back just made me laugh so hard. 

 

4 hours ago, Kersenne said:

@Yato America didn't win WW1&2, they only helped the winners  Well ok, let's say the Allies won (and the USA only entered the war pretty late)

WW1 that is true because America was isolationist at the time, but come one let's be real in WW2 France was invaded and taken over in seven weeks and the British army had to retreat from Dunkirk on fishing boats. By this point the U.S. was sending over supplies to keep England from falling to the Germans as well.  

[borkfork]

@Linh Cinder Pretty much covered it.

 

Third grade (age 8-9) was local history. We talked about the local silver rush, native tribes, and the railroad. That was the first time I ate fry bread.

 

Fourth was state history. We did the traditional California Mission project where we built models from scratch. No kits! We had plots where we dug for "gold" in the morning which was really fun. 

 

Sixth and seventh were world history, mostly pre-Columbian. 

 

I remember my world history teacher in high school saying some uninformed things about world religions. Like some things about kosher meat that any hunter would also do. 

 

The atrocities committed by the Japanese during WWII were ignored. The Japanese internment camps in the U.S. (and Canada) weren't mentioned in our textbook, and some parents got extremely upset by our field trip to Manzanar. There's little mention to this day how people of Italian descent in North America were treated.

 

I worked in an elementary school a few years ago and history and science are no longer part of the curriculum until sixth grade. Which is horseshit; it's teaching to the test. They do the science fair, that's it for science. The lack of perspective when reading anything historic is mind boggling. By age 10 kids should know cellphones and Netflix weren't always a thing, just like we knew CDs and cable TV were relatively new. Explaining the moonlanding to ten year-olds... I might as well have been speaking French.

[Kersenne]

40 minutes ago, ♣Ryan♣ said:

WW1 that is true because America was isolationist at the time, but come one let's be real in WW2 France was invaded and taken over in seven weeks and the British army had to retreat from Dunkirk on fishing boats. By this point the U.S. was sending over supplies to keep England from falling to the Germans as well.  

I don't deny the USA helped during the war, but they're not the winners^^ The ones who won the war were the Allies - and the USA was part of it  And it would be unfair to forget the fact that only half of France had stopped fighting, and that Général de Gaulle brought the French back into the thick of war and never stopped fighting. Well anyway, war's an ugly thing and this one was the most ugly of all, I hope we never have war like that again.

[Kersenne]

4 hours ago, Philip027 said:

I don't really remember, because I didn't really care.  Tell me something interesting about people that are still actually alive maybe, not people that have been dead for a century or more.

Oh so you're not interested in what happened before us? I always found that I could understand current events better by knowing what happened in the past. It also helps me to understand different cultures - in France, we have many different regions and all of them have strong different cultures. Why is that? Where do these differences come from? Why is there such a rift between north and south? Why are we so reknown for always being upset? Why do we strike so much compared to other countries? I found many answers in our history, and that's why I find history so fascinating  And knowing about world history also helps me understand language better (French coming mostly from Latin), international relationships, trade and economy, etc. Although, I do agree that the present is also fascinating, if only because we are living it!!  

[XYZ96]

from what I can remember we did ancient rom at least twice.., Germany in the middle ages, the 30-years war, the French Revolution multiple times, the american revolution once, pre WWI from the German Confederation through to Bismarck and Wilhelm I-II, WWI (I think twice), the Weimarer Republic like three times, the rise and fall of Hitler many time (the rise of Hitler once more then the fall, because our teacher was really slow with moving the curriculum along) and nazi-Germany and WWII, the cold war and the GDR more then once.. Most of History class revolved around Germany and the only thing we really did outside of Europe was, other then the bombing of Japan in WWII, the China-expedition under Wilhelm II and colonial Africa (none of which were topics of their own, they were under other topics), the american revolution... 

The topics that were taken through the most or longest were Nazi-Germany, the French Revolution and the Weimarer Republic

(and I can't remember elementary school history, I think we did Columbus and stuff, and in 5th or 6th grade sometimes we did the civil rights movement in the States, I lived in a different country back then)

[borkfork]

6 hours ago, Kersenne said:

 

I wish we had more classes about prehistory and dinosaurs, for instance... 

 

I think dinosaurs fall under science.

 

Prehistory was defined for us as human activity before written language, so before 4000(?) BCE.

[Kersenne]

13 hours ago, borkfork said:

I think dinosaurs fall under science.

 

Prehistory was defined for us as human activity before written language, so before 4000(?) BCE.

I thought dinosaurs fell under archeology, which I imagined would fit in history, but I agree that it could just as well fit under science! 

 

Prehistory was defined for us as the beginning of humanity, so about 2,8 million years ago, and end, like you say, with the beginning of written language (about 3.500 BC, even though this date is not entirely reliable, as written language differed in different places and some cultures relied strongly on oral language as opposed to written language). I find this so fascinating  

[Ankh-Morpork]

I went to school in Vienna. We started with the developmentof the human species but the 1st big topic was Egypt and Mesopotamia. The next topics were classic Greece and Rome, their politics, architecture, philosophy, Roman Emperors / Dictators, the split in the Eastern and Western Empire

 

The next big topic was the Mediveal Age, starting with the Völkerwanderung. I can't remember much from that time, though, it was kinda boring.

 

It got more interesting with the Renaissance period. We didn't learn much about America, though, the main focus was on Enlightment, Reformation, Counter-Reformation and the political developments in Europe. (With a main focus on Austria and the Holy Roman Empire).

We didn't learn much about the American independence war, but the French Revolution and its influence on Europe was a big topic.

Other topics I can remember till 1900 were Napoleon, the revolutions in 1848, the foundation of the German Reich and the Austro-Hungarian tensions which ended in the compromise of 1867 (split in two countries).

 

A really big focus was on both world wars (more on the 2nd than on the 1st) and the time between them, but mostly with an Austrian perspective. (e.g. the pacific war was only a side topic.) The foundation of the Republic of Austria was very important, of course.

 

After WWII we mostly learned Austrian contemporary history and a little bit of the important wars since 1945. The last thing we learned was the fall of the Berlin wall and reunification of Germany.

 

In Religion class we also learned much about the history of the Catholic church.

[Knight of Cydonia]

In Canada I took "social studies" classes. From what I remember (it's been a while!):

 

Grade 8 - Ancient Greece, Rome, China, other old civs

Grade 9 - Government, history of Europe, mainly England and France (e.g. development of religion, Industrial revolution, French Revolution...)

Grade 10 - Canadian History, from early settlements of the English and French up to the present

Grade 11 - World Wars

Grade 12 - There wasn't a Social Studies 12, but you could take Comparative Civilizations (ancient civs and mythology, which is what I took) or History (strong focus on World War 2, I think)

[Gloomy]

I learned about all kinds of history depending on what grade I was in. For example in high school I remember 9th grade was ancient civilizations to medieval times, 10th grade was from like the 1700's to the early 1900's, and we did get into WW1 and WW2 that year, and 11th grade was American history. In 12th grade I didn't have a "history" class, but we had one semester of economics and one semester of government, both of which had some history lessons integrated in them.

[Semiterrestrial Scientist]

U.S. History. World history

[daveb]

It's been a while since I was in elementary, junior high or high school so I don't remember many details. There was less history then. The Vietnam war was current events. I know we studied Latin America in grade school one year (more as social studies, so while it included some history I think it was mostly about geography and the current situation at the time). We also studied US history, from the colonies up through WWII (not sure if we covered the Korean war). In college I took a few classes in other areas (Islam and the Arab world, more US history, a bit of world history, I think). Most of my study of history has been from reading quite a few books over the years - Viking era, British history, exploration, various wars, and anything else that strikes my fancy. I'm sure there are gaping holes in my knowledge of history, but it's a wide field, even if you limit it to recorded history (when people had some form of writing).  

[flagsforhippos]

Guy Fawkes                                          the British/American slave trade                   

Great fire of London                           something about the Romans ???

Great Plague of London                     The Battle of Hastings

World War I                                          The Black Death

World War II                                         The English Civil War 

 

and that's pretty much everything I remember being taught in history lessons.

 

 

[A mere monkey]

Depends on the year or the teacher. Only last year it was History of Spain exclussively, the other years it wass all about western history pretty much. Some teachers were more biased than others, as well. One of them said the Second Spanish Republic was the greatest period of our history or something. In History of Spain I found out that was just a bunch of shit and that it was a complete disaster. A strong government wouldn't have failed to suppress a coup or plant the seeds of a civil war. 

[CaptainYesterday]

[deleted]

[VBA]

talking history  is my favourite. i am an indian and asexual hetero-romantic. but a strongly committed man to research. unfortunately, in india, history is being twisted to suit the right wing politics. that is a sad thing to happen. i also heard that the upper class/caste Indian people in the US are influencing the american syllabi (history and social science) to twist India's social-history. it is really a sad thing to happen. anybody here to share whats happening in the US about Indian social history. i will be glad to hear from you.

 

[v]