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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I grew up in Texas (HS class of ‘89) and I assure you, the textbooks covered the Civil War as a MAJOR thing that was definitely about slavery.  We covered slavery, Dred Scott, the Underground Railroad, Reconstruction, the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, lynchings, the Jim Crow laws, Plessy v Ferguson, Brown v. Board of Education, Rosa Parks, MLK Jr., Frederich Douglas, Harriet Tubman,  George Washington Carver, Langston Hughes, Buffalo  Soldiers, Tuskegee Airmen, etc.

We also covered broken treaties with Native Americans, the Trail of Tears, massacres, widespread buffalo slaughter, reservations and reservation schools, Windtalkers, etc.

We covered Japanese internment camps and Chinese exclusion laws.

We covered Caesar Chavez and migrant workers.

The textbooks weren’t perfect.  There is always room for improvement in anything.  My teachers (like good teachers everywhere) occasionally supplemented with additional materials to provide additional information and to make it more interesting, but the textbooks provided  a strong foundation and framework to expand upon.  On occasion, the textbooks might have a typo or factual error, but that was after they had been edited and reviewed by teams of subject matter experts and consequently reviewed and selected by the state.  I had far more confidence in them than I do with a haphazard curriculum put together by a local school district.[/quote]

NP. I grew up in NC and they did not teach this stuff you mention. The Civil War was definitely taught as op described it. I was taught it had little to do with slavery and more to do with states rights and Northerners attacking Southerners on their land. We were taught that very few people were slave owners. We never learned much about Native Americans. Even worse we lived close to a fairly sizable population of Native Americans and never learned about them. [/quote]

Wow, and did you all generally believe what you were taught or did you know they were glossing over just about everything?[/quote]

I’m not the PP but the only way you find out what was missing in your education is to keep educating yourself as an adult.

I found out in college that my school system left out a lot about the Cold War.    We learned all about Russia wanting to take over the world with communism.  The Soviet Union wasn’t enough.

My high school didn’t talk about “both side”.    The US was so obsessed with the evils of  communism that our CIA was behind many coups in South America and propping up dictators which they saw as preferable to socialist leaders.  The most well known was Chile.  During the early 70s Chile had a democratically elected leader, Allende, who was liberal/socialist.    The CIA bankrolled the coup d’Etat and installed Pinochet as dictator.

Discuss the Cold War with your teens and see how well your teachers are doing.   [/quote]

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