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In my public school World History class, we spent a week on the Mayflower and never got to the Holocaust – most of the WWII education we got was about D-Day (surprise surprise). Nothing on Civil Rights, nothing on the Japanese internment camps, nothing past 1946. https://twitter.com/USA_Polling/status/1354509110138560520
But textbooks – and, thus, history curriculums are all manufactured by private white Christian conservative-owned companies. Of course they want you to know about heroic D-Day and not the fact that we threw Japanese Americans in concentration camps. This is all intentional.
And why would an incredibly propagandistic American history education curriculum want you to know that America and Britain had a very clear picture of what was happening to the Jews in the Third Reich – and denied Jewish-German refugees entry into the US?
German education is far from perfect, but I'll give them enough credit that they're willing to say "yeah, we did this." American history education has the nuance of a Superman comic book.
And let's be clear: I think those textbook companies know a lot of those classes won't get past 1946 over the course of the semester. Saves the teachers trouble of trying to justify the Korean War, Vietnam, the Gulf War, the Iraq War, the War on Terror, etc.
And you know these textbooks never go into the fascist military coups we've backed across the world against socialist governments in the name of "democracy."
I can hear them going "oh but they'll find that out somewhere else" – sure, but you have no idea where they'll get their historical analysis. As shown by this poll, this very neoliberal, deregulated, underfunded form of education is doing its best to erase history.
Also judging from the rest of this discussion, you can probably tell that after spending a week on the Mayflower we moved immediately past all those Indigenous people who died as a result lol
