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Comment by rangibaby | Hacker News Reader

It's not like Japan would be the first country to selectively remember history to make itself look good. I doubt they teach much about Dresden in the UK, or the extermination of Indians in America, or killing literally every Aborigine in Tasmania, or the British forcing the Chinese to buy opium.

I went to school in Japan and we didn't learn a sugar-coated version of history. We went to Hiroshima and listened to a talk from a bomb survivor who told us it was our job to make a world where something like that could never happen again.

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In American schools an overwhelming amount of time is spent teaching about the sins of our country and other white people. Slavery, Jim Crow laws, the genocide of Native Americans. In a unit on WWII, a week would be spent on the entire war, and the other 3 specifically dedicated to the Holocaust. All in all I'd say we spent over half of our history lessons and a third of our English lessons covering subjects like these.

Agreed. Not sure why you were downvoted. You can find this information in American history textbooks or online.

Very true, and a great point. There are still gaps, though. How many schools teach you the reasons that Germany turned against Jewish people after WWI? In fact, how many schools teach the history of WWI in any kind of detail at all? And what about the reasons for the Southern resistance during the Civil War? My recollection (and I went to an expensive private school) was that these wars were characterized as simplistic, binary good/evil conflicts, where a bunch of "bad" people went nuts and had to be sorted out by "good guys" who were obviously right. If someone asked a question like "why did National Socialism focus on Jewish people", that person would be immediately shunned and the question would be offensive——again my experience. If you don't let people ask difficult questions, and provide answers for them, it isn't so much an education as a program.

I was trying not to ruffle feathers, but that's what I was getting at. I was quite liberal as a teenager but even I could tell that history/social studies was mostly used as an opportunity to indoctrinate. The one teacher I had that tried to provide opposing views on every topic got canned.

I agree with you but the schools' focus on the Holocaust, in my experience, was heavily centered on the Jewish experience, despite that many millions of non Jews were also exterminated. I guess this is because America has lots of Jews but not so many Poles, handicapped, homosexuals, etc (or they don't have much political power).

Also I remember learning about measles blankets and all that, but it never got to the point of using this historical context to inform a discussion of the current social/economic situation Native Americans face. All in all it was portrayed as a romantic and fair battle between cowboys and Indians.

Tldr the only war crimes we teach our kids are those whose victims have survived and attained some political prominence.

The eradication of Native Americans was discussed extensively during my public school education in the US. Make of this anecdote what you will.

I'm encouraged by that, actually. It's a morbid and uncomfortable topic, but those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

In the UK, children are definitely taught a history to be proud of in general. Which is the opposite of how history is taught in Germany. But there were a few exceptions. I'm certain we studied the Allied bombing of Dresden and also the massacres that occurred during the Indian independence movement.

It seems only right to me that children be taught pride in their country and their history. There's no need to teach people to cringe at the mention of their nation.

There is a middle ground between hating their nation and blind national chauvinism. And if one must choose between extremes, "cringing" beats the heck out of falling in line and being a party to genocide

> There's no need to teach people to cringe at the mention of their nation.

Ideally, teachers do not tell kids what to feel. Teachers share facts.

The USA just kicked President Jackson off the front of the $20 bill, and his genocide was part of the reason he was the least respected money face.

The "Trail of Tears" is a major unit in several years of K-12 education.

Of course, one might wonder how Jackson has been on the $20 for this long to begin.

That's pretty straight-forward. Until the last ~30-50 years the vast majority of the US population held a high or at worst neutral opinion of Jackson.

From, say, 1928-1960 there was practically no wide-spread criticism of Jackson's personal history regarding Native Americans (or any of his other terrible beliefs).

Consider that FDR is still very highly regarded by the left in the US, despite the fact that he was a blatant racist and interned a hundred-thousand Japanese-Americans.

Sounds like progress. We shouldn't forget the oppressors, but we also shouldn't honor them.

In Australia, the extermination of all Tasmanian aborigines was definitely not taught in highschool, in at least the late 80s when I went. It's not suppressed at all, and plenty of people are aware of it, but it's certainly not taught (or at least, wasn't at that time).

We were taught in high school, ~15 years ago.

I remember wondering how it was actually performed. The story was told as a long line of men walking from on end of the island to the other, killing any aboriginals they found in the process. Tasmania is a very large island, so it seemed like they would need an inordinate number of men to form a line that joined all the way across it, and it would take a very long time to walk the length of it.

Turns out the line was a real thing, called the Black Line [1], and was part of a war called the Black War [2].

Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur decided to remove all Aborigines from the settled areas in order to end the escalating raids upon settlers' huts. He was also concerned about preventing the settlers from taking the law into their own hands and launching revenge attacks. To accomplish this he called upon every able-bodied male colonist, convict or free, to form a human chain that then swept across the settled districts, moving south and east for several weeks in an attempt to corral the Aborigines on the Tasman Peninsula by closing off Eaglehawk Neck (the isthmus connecting the Tasman peninsula to the rest of the island) where Arthur hoped that they could live and maintain their culture and language. This action was only directed against Aborigines of the Big River and Oyster Bay tribes, since the conflict was only with these two tribes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Line

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_War

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