i.e that white people invented absolutely everything and Europe is the only old world with history worth studying? Then again maybe it's changed in the past 15 years?
However, when I was in high school our textbooks were so concerned with political correctness that if anything they were overly focussed on diversity.
I took AP US history, World History, Asian History, and AP European History. The Average student only got one section of European history in the overall World History class.
>that white people invented absolutely everything and Europe is the only old world with history worth studying? Then again maybe it's changed in the past 15 years?
I find it very hard to believe (not impossible, just very unlikely) that you were actually taught that. More likely you just saw your history classes through your own biases.
E.g everybody knows when he studies history what this article says along the invention of the compass and gears and zero and algebra in Asia.
But people from western countries invented almost everything since the Guttemberg press, maybe because of this press, as books became hundreds or thousand of times cheaper that what they were before and Asian countries had to face an obsolete language with thousand of characters (Japanese realised they had such and inferior language and created higajana and katakana later).
Knowledge spread so fast other places could not compete. It has nothing to do with the color of your skin.
If China was not united during the incursions by European countries in the 1800's, maybe they'd have ended up even worse off.
With today's technology, would you say Chinese is now un-obsoleted?
We're taught as if there is a concrete separation between American History and World History, when in fact, teaching America separately means artificially separating it from the rest of the world and having to constantly compensate for that.
I find that very unlikely. If it is true please don't go around making statements like we are taught in america is that nothing happens outside of america.
You can't speak for America as a whole since we don't have a national curriculum.
More than likely you just feel the way you do because you just took US history and haven't gotten to any or the world history classes.
>We're taught as if there is a concrete separation between American History and World History,
There's nothing wrong with teaching a separate US history and world History class. When you get to college you'll find that history classes are even further subdivided by time and geography.
And college history courses assume that you already have enough knowledge from high school history courses to understand the historical context of what they teach, but by teaching American history separate (and before) world history, we are not taught any global context for events in American History.
If that's true you are an extremely rare case. I just took a look at the social studies standards for my state (Georgia, not exactly a top performer education wise) for middle schoool.
6th grade is the history and geography of Latin America, the Caribbean, Canada, Europe and Australia, 7th is Africa, Southwest Asia (Middle East), Southern and Eastern Asia, and 8th is US/Georgia History.
If you really haven't had any world history since 3rd grade it looks like it may have been a consequence of moving between 3 states.
If each state had world history at a different year in their curriculum, you may have missed them entirely.
Please don't try to speak for America on a forum with an international audience. Your experience is not representative.
When i was in elementary school in NYC, we learned about ancient civilizations and NYC history in 4th grade -- the ancient part was kicked off with a field trip to the Egyptian artifacts at the Met.
In high school in upstate ny, we studied global history and current events from grade 9 through 11. The Chinese portion sucked -- we basically covered the opium wars though the cultural revolution, but we studied many aspects of global history.