Current Events > My mom said she's never heard of the Trail of Tears

(+) Yeah! (+)

Bro what the fuck
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It is what it is

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Why is that shocking?

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Just show her this and it will teach her all she needs to know:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wqw527ivrQE

The_Korey posted...

Why is that shocking?

....

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You might have heard, our education system is not the best.

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American education system doesnt like teaching the bad parts of American history

It's not that shocking tbh. I didn't learn about it til APUSH. American schools really do whitewash the bad stuff in history

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CADE FOSTER posted...

American education system doesnt like teaching the bad parts of American history

Bestoffuture posted...

It's not that shocking tbh. I didn't learn about it til APUSH. American schools really do whitewash the bad stuff in history

damn same here

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CrimsonRage posted...

iirc you're from canada so it's not that big of a shock. most americans still think we're an innocent country who never did anything wrong and know nothing about what canada did to first nations. >.>

Honestly I figured it was something that would have come up at least once in her life
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Does the US teach about the war crimes in Vietnam? Over here the British empire gets glossed over for similar attempts at hiding anything we did wrong.

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spikethedevil posted...

Does the US teach about the war crimes in Vietnam? Over here the British empire gets glossed over for similar attempts at hiding anything we did wrong.

I think we went over it briefly in my history class, but the bigger focus during that period was the cultural and societal changes that were occurring during the war.

Edit: Oh, we definitely did cover some stuff on Agent Orange as well and the damages caused by the defoliants in general. There was even a picture of the famous Napalm Girl in our textbook.

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spikethedevil posted...

Does the US teach about the war crimes in Vietnam? Over here the British empire gets glossed over for similar attempts at hiding anything we did wrong.

History is written by the victors so def not

spikethedevil posted...

Does the US teach about the war crimes in Vietnam? Over here the British empire gets glossed over for similar attempts at hiding anything we did wrong.

I'm a millenial from a state with a good education system. In a couple different classes in middle/high school we were "supposed" to, but we never got past WW2 because killing nazis justifies all our foreign policies in perpetuity
edit: not that we even mentioned united fruit co or our role in the philippines, etc.

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Pogo_Marimo posted...

I think we went over it briefly in my history class, but the bigger focus during that period was the cultural and societal changes that were occurring during the war.

Edit: Oh, we definitely did cover some stuff on Agent Orange as well and the damages caused by the defoliants in general. There was even a picture of the famous Napalm Girl in our textbook.

I was talking more about

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M_Lai_massacre

@Pogo_Marimo

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spikethedevil posted...

I was talking more about

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M_Lai_massacre

@Pogo_Marimo

I can't say for certain if My Lai was addressed. I don't think there was any real intent in my classes to hide the disgusting behavior of the USA in the war though. At the end of the day there's only so much one can cover in a high school history class, but I believe the textbooks and the teachers left the impression that the USA was fighting a nearly pointless war that resulted in an incredible and unnecessary amount of bloodshed.

I will stipulate that I live in Massachusetts and my state does put a higher emphasis on education than 90%+ of other states, and we are not nearly as wed to ideals of nationalism as most states.

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spikethedevil posted...

Does the US teach about the war crimes in Vietnam? Over here the British empire gets glossed over for similar attempts at hiding anything we did wrong.

You're lucky to even touch on the Vietnam War in my experience. I don't think I ever had a history class go that far.

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We also gloss over the atrocities that Native Americans have committed in a way that frames them as subhuman.

Theyre just like us, good and bad.

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spikethedevil posted...

Does the US teach about the war crimes in Vietnam? Over here the British empire gets glossed over for similar attempts at hiding anything we did wrong.

It depends on the teacher. My AP US history teacher went into a lot of detail about the shut America has done and had A People's History of the United States as required summer reading.

My friend who took the same class in the same school district touched on almost none of that.


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Was your Mom interested in History thru her school years? I mean, honestly, if we learned anything from Jay Walking (Jay Leno's bit), it's that a lot of people don't care about anything except their current events. Could be this was taught to your Mom, and she just was too young or forgot about it over the years given a potentially hectic life.

CADE FOSTER posted...

American education system doesnt like teaching the bad parts of American history

Yeah, I was surprised at how many people didn't know what the Black Wall St. massacre was. The Watchmen TV series turned a lot of people on to that.

American history is often sanitized and whitewashed. The Trail of Tears, Black Wall St., Red Summer, Chinese Exclusion Act, Japanese internment, etc were either not covered when I was in school or they went by it at break neck speed.

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So is Maryland education better than the rest of the country? I learned about the Trail of Tears, Vietnam, Japanese internement, and all sorts of world history. And it wasn't an AP class either.

Didn't learn about the Tulsa Massacre tho. That's one US story that was really well buried until recently.

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Fwiw I'm absolutely not surprised she never learned it in school given that would've been the 60s and 70s in small-town Manitoba and Saskatchewan.

I'm more surprised that at no point has it come up in any other capacity.
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I first learned about the Trail of tears in some old movie.

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