Hey Pandas, What Historical Facts Should Be Taught More Thoroughly? (Closed)

yet, when religion is taught, teachers aren't equipped with the right education to respect all religious beliefs, often leading to an internal and external struggle between 'which religion is better'. it's quite difficult for a hindu teacher to teach how christ was born to a virgin, or for a muslim teacher to explain how hindus believe in lakhs of gods. until we all are equipped with the right mentality to learn, i don't think we'll be ready to teach

yeah and how religion has been forced on people, it always baffles me like people of colour theyre all about god etc but before us, the white folk went to Africa etc they had their own gods and we called them savages and made them believe in Jesus and forget their gods, and no one seems to be talking about that or waking up and abandoning religion all together

As an Atheist, I totally agree. Whether you believe it or don't, religion has been the foundation of almost every historic concept/event. I am a very atheist person and have found religion to be extremely fascinating, as it explains so many other things such as the crusades which can be understood much better if we first know the true beginning and reason for these wars. Religion is also one of the most influential powers to this day, and events that are still happening are often related to religion in some way.

In Greece students have a book that has our religion and that is a lesson

I totally agree!

We in Germany learn such things in school - mostly because we had a lot of them in our history

I think teaching about slavery should be more prevalent, given I got to 30yrs old before I learnt about Kanankas who worked in Australia. The holocaust for us was talked about in depth, as we studied Schindler's List, so we looked at all the ethics of that. Then in Uni we studied The boy in the striped Pyjamas (my sister learnt about it in yr 7 too).

Slavery has affected all cultures for millenia, its not just African people every country has a history of slavery

which schools? Schools in USA teach both all the time

I took a reacting to the past class on Argentina at the tail end of its military dictatorship. That was the hardest class that caused me to understand that time in a visceral way. No other history class (and I've had a lot) came close to providing the emotional history as well as the informational history as that. It's been almost 10 years since I had it qnd I still think about it from time to time and reflect on just how close all of that trauma is to people in Argentina.

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Unfortunately in the USA slavery is taught as "White people are evil" and that's about it.

YES!! THIS!! Prioritise UNDERSTANDING not MEMORISATION. These, antithese, synthese! You have my most emphatic upvote, good sir Kaine!

I would add - purpose. So in sciences and mathematics, you're taught a bunch of facts, theories and equations, but never what they're used for. Speaking as a teacher. I always explain WHY we are learning about this or that.

THIS! All of this! Every year I am in history, all I want to learn about is how were Native Americans like before European settlement, but instead we get a WHOLE FRIGGIN UNIT on Andrew Jackson, 'cause he's clearly more important than thousands of years of history, right?

I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry here. Are there seriously americans that think a continent the size of north america was just... empty before the evicted puritans got there?

It was a society based on contribution for the good of the group..group hunts, gathering and sharing food and skills.

Nonsense. People were people they didn't change basic nature as time went on. Learn to stop cognitive bias.

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First and foremost : SEX, not gender. Gender is a modern notion of such vanity that one would hope anyone could fathom would require obscene levels of idleness to invent and flesh out to it's current preposterous level of overrepresentation on the world stage. Prehistory for the most part did not include humans at all, let alone modern medicine allowing those humans to live much longer than 30-35 years. Structural, sensory, mental, or developmental defects were a death sentence and childbirth the single most dangerous time in any woman's life. As for your revisionist views on masculinity and femininity, you know as well as I that is a WILD exaggeration. These people were not a fairy tale like Adam & Eve (or Steve, if you prefer); their bones have been found and we can see their lives on those bones. Density, weight, porosity, mineral makeup, scarring, inclusions, healing; you can scarcely imagine how much information we can now mine from seemingly inconsequential pieces of bone.

Neither were they messy babarians - they actually had the reputation of being arrogant for taking sevaral baths during the week. They had "rap" battles, accepted homosexual relationships as long as they had offspring and were quite educated

Did they go singing into battle?

Skål!

Also the concept that people married really young in european medieval times. It still seems very prevalent and it is totally wrong but i gave seen it used many times to defend sexism

“ people from that era=dumb, prejudiced people with silly ideas).” Things never change.

To be clear, Europeans were mostly illiterate, as the Catholic Church made it illegal for anyone who was not a clergy to learn how to read and write. But Europe is not the whole world.

No worries. I posit that black slavery, having existed only a short while (despite that being a substantial portion of the USA's lifespan as a nation) compared to that of for instance China (the Great Wall is as old as the USA itself, built by slaves worked to death, and filled with the bodies of their dead), or Egypt (finishing work was artisans, but the bulk of logistics was slave-powered and spanned millennia). The early americans were religious zealots that refused to stop persecuting on the basis of faith and were evicted from england as a result. The fact this is taught in american schools as "freedom from religious persecution" is VERY telling. I take it feudal europe and the patricians that built it are outside your purview? You can call it whitewashing if you enjoy the thought, but until VERY recently, the european notion of darkskinned was Spaniard, because africans simply didn't exist in europe.

We lost a lot of history and technology because of the church. Anything that drew attention and money away from the church was condemned. Knowledge was destroyed, or hidden. And educating women was usually against the law. Religions have long lists of what NOT to do. Even that movie based on Carl Sagan's view of space hinged on a lame religious question/affiliation. Separate church and state and there will be massive leaps forward in education and quality of life.

Your definition of automatons may be a little lax, but although american corporate avarice killed off a lot more than Nikola Tesla, I grant you he was a singular visionary that could have achieved untold potential if only he hadn't left the civilised world in 1884. Ms. Hansen quite rightly points out that religion has taken even more from us than oil barons ever could, but then that's avarice on an entirely different scale by comparison.

The reason for teaching history is to learn from past mistakes in order to prevent repeating them. How can we prevent the mistakes from happening again if we don't know the truth? The US Government is not that different from communist countries that teach their children only communism. Our government is so worried about covering stuff up because they "can't be wrong".

It's all manufactured history to create patriotism. Once you have patriotism you have cannon fodder. Once you have cannon fodder you can test your latest weapons in the field and make arms sales. All part of the economy.

Much of history that is currently taught is propaganda and not truth. Only the truth should be taught.

My state just outlawed teaching Critical Race Theory.

Several in China and Manchuria too, but some people - in my university of all places - said that genocide is "too harsh a word" for the systematic hunt for and targetted murder of 1 million people of a population of 2.5 million...

Also the deportations during the reign of Stalin in the USSR - everybody connects Germany to such things during that time (rightfully), but the USSR often somehow gets overlooked

You forgot Congo, the worst of the lot. 11 million dead. Culprit: Leopold II of Belgium.

"The" Holocaust was actually pretty average as regards numbers killed and percentage of a population. What makes it unique is that it was perpetrated by fanatical record-keepers upon fanatical record-keepers, and then it got used to start a new genocide.

I hate how much of history is based on war instead of on human achievement

as a Texan, this is something that infuriates me about our history. WE HAVE WHOLE YEARS LEARNING ABOUT OUR HISTORY STOP ONLY TALKING ABOUT THE ALAMO AND START TALKING ABOUT THE REST OF OUR HISTORY.

Why isn't Texas Independence Day not celebrated? Cinco De Mayo people go wild. No one seems to know March 2nd is one of Texas' best days! But I see no parades, no festivals and very few people know the state song . . . not The Eyes of Texas, but Texas, Our Texas. There could be a lot of fun and another holiday. Yee Haw, cowboys & cowgirls!

I would also like contextualisation and place in history. Why do we care about world war 1? What did it teach us? What is the relevance of Napoleon? Why should we care about the french revolution? Or the Meiji restoration?

Quick aside, just wanted to congratulate you on a job well done. Understanding is always superior to memorisation, but fairly tedious to score, unlike numbers. I forget the source, but someone said "never let your schooling interfere with your education" and that really spoke to me. You are the example for your peers, taking your education in your own hands to tie together all the (frankly unimportant) numbers you were forced to memorise. Well done.