Yeah it was a middle school thing in Finland too, at least in the 90’s.
I did an exchange year in the US in my 2nd high school year, and I was honestly a bit surprised at how… well, simple it all was. I was a senior in the US and I’d learned just about everything they taught that wasn’t specific to the US or the English language (and even some of those…) either in my 1st year in high school or in middle school.
In my experience as an American, I’ve learned the same thing in multiple years, we kind of just chose a point to stop at and did that for our entire god damn school year, never moving on. We could have talked about so much interesting history, but no, we need to talk about WW2 and completely gloss over most other things for the 12th year in a row
For christs sakes I was learning FRACTIONS AND DECIMALS IN MY SENIOR YEAR
I will admit the reason my last two years were such a stark contrast to my previous years was because I went from honors down to basic because I went to a vocational high school, Diamond Oaks, and they only had the base classes
But still I never want to have another history class on WW2 again, I don’t mind learning the era but I’ve relearned the same thing over and over again
American schools cover the civil and 2 great wars because those were the last times we were arguably the good guys. Every war since has been a conflict we started by meddling or we had no good reason to be there
Yeah it was a middle school thing in Finland too, at least in the 90’s.
I did an exchange year in the US in my 2nd high school year, and I was honestly a bit surprised at how… well, simple it all was. I was a senior in the US and I’d learned just about everything they taught that wasn’t specific to the US or the English language (and even some of those…) either in my 1st year in high school or in middle school.
In my experience as an American, I’ve learned the same thing in multiple years, we kind of just chose a point to stop at and did that for our entire god damn school year, never moving on. We could have talked about so much interesting history, but no, we need to talk about WW2 and completely gloss over most other things for the 12th year in a row
For christs sakes I was learning FRACTIONS AND DECIMALS IN MY SENIOR YEAR
Are you sure you weren’t in a remedial school? lol
I will admit the reason my last two years were such a stark contrast to my previous years was because I went from honors down to basic because I went to a vocational high school, Diamond Oaks, and they only had the base classes
But still I never want to have another history class on WW2 again, I don’t mind learning the era but I’ve relearned the same thing over and over again
American schools cover the civil and 2 great wars because those were the last times we were arguably the good guys. Every war since has been a conflict we started by meddling or we had no good reason to be there
lol and saying “we” were the good guys in the civil war implies that we were also the bad guys, so that one cancels.
When your history class is written by the same folks responsible for the History Channel circa ~2002-2010.