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Why Do Young People Have Trouble With U.S. History?
Their access to information is conflicting with the curated version we try to teach them.
The political right in the United States has long assailed public education as a bastion of leftism. Indeed, on July 3rd, 2020, President Trump stated:
“Against every law of society and nature, our children are taught in school to hate their own country and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes but that they were villains. The radical view of American history is a web of lies, all perspective is removed, every virtue is obscured, every motive is twisted, every fact is distorted and every flaw is magnified until the history is purged and the record is disfigured beyond all recognition.”
Of course, President Trump never actually attended public school. Those of us who did attend public schools and currently have children in them, know this to be largely untrue.
While there may be a push in some jurisdictions recently to have a more inclusive US History curriculum, public schools tend to teach from a perspective of American Exceptionalism. This view highlights the positive aspects of US History. It does teach many of the negative aspects, because they are inescapable — slavery, the Civil War, Great Depression…
