Opinion: High school sets us up with sufficient tools for a basic understanding of our nation’s history, but what about others?
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To earn a diploma from most American public high schools, it is standard for one of the required history courses to be “U.S. History and Government,” whereas the optional history electives are “World History and Geography” or “European Studies.” In my Oregon public elementary school, the only history I can recall having full units about were the Oregon Trail, slavery, Christopher Columbus and that’s pretty much it. Middle school was the early trenches of history for the most part; basically learning about the Romans and the Greeks is what I can remember from that time I try to forget.
When history classes for children only focus on U.S. history, it starts a narrative early on that only American history is needed to be considered “educated.” This is a slap in the face to any child who may feel a sense of identity and belonging to a country other than America. Problematic thinking evolves, making children so young already start to feel a sense of shame to carry more than one identity. Shame and embarrassment of a different culture is so apparent in the society of friend groups and bullying in American public schools. To have this shame start so young in your life makes it even harder to try and break that barrier and become prideful later on in your schooling.
Fast forward to high school, and we get big full textbooks just describing American history from its inception to the 1990s when the book was printed. So, unless you take it upon yourself to take extra classes other than the bare minimum, that is the extent of your “history” as you enter the real world, where you’re expected to have an opinion and “side” of worldwide history and global politics.
Other than myself, none of my friends from high school took any AP history classes or electives. And I get why. The rest of them have grown up with American parents who also went to American public high schools and have only learned American history and government.
But what about the children of immigrants and multi-generational families who have been exposed to a completely different government and a completely different “national history?” What about those who have learned about significant genocides and wars their ancestors experienced that weren’t just in North America?
The first time I noticed just how little Americans understood global politics were the campaigns of “Sleepy Joe is making our gas prices so high he is the worst president we have had.” Well, no –– the ability to change gas prices is not one of the direct powers of the president of the United States. A major war was coming to fruition in Europe with Ukraine and Russia, with Russia being our main source of oil, and inflation was going up in literally every country in Europe, certain countries in Asia, Africa and overall, not just the U.S. But see, Americans don’t know and don’t care about how other countries impact us because that isn’t what we are taught to care about.
Without any direct familial relation, most Americans do not know about conflicts that the U.S. was not directly involved in internationally. Fast forward to now, it has become glaringly apparent again in the aftermath of social media posts and specific language used when discussing the Israel-Palestine conflict. The naive attempts at trying to understand the situation unfolding in Gaza are essentially useless if they don’t include any other history from that region since 1948. But, again, we have not been taught or trained to care about a different country’s situation post-World War II — we were trained to care about our own.
It should be obvious to state that the countries you do not currently live in and their culture and history matter. History is essential to understanding and empathizing with others. Schools must prioritize implementing courses to combat this crisis in a world where empathy is dwindling and selfishness is climbing. It should not be Kim Kardashian teaching my generation about the Armenian genocide — professional educators should be.