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Comment by adrusi | Hacker News Reader

The way we are taught in america is that nothing happens outside of america. I am a high school sophomore and so far I have had to site through 5 years of American History classes, and no World History classes. In these classes we learn about the contributions of blacks to society, and in more recent history, the contributions of other races, but hardly anything about other countries unless we were at war with them.

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.

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You're telling me you've never learned about Ancient Greece, Ancient Egypt, China, Medieval Europe?

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.

The only time I was ever taught about ancient greece, egypt, china, etc was in third grade, and I hardly think that counts. I've gone to school in three different states, so I have at least some reasonable sample of nation, and although there is no national curriculum, the curricula are generally similar enough.

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.

>The only time I was ever taught about ancient greece, egypt, china, etc was in third grade, and I hardly think that counts.

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.

Perhaps you are stuck in some weird loop due to attending school in different states, or have attended really lousy schools.

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.

In my state (Michigan) world history is a state wide requirement, so the first part of your comment is absolutely wrong. And I can't talk about any other schools, but the school I attended (a large, public, middle of the road high school) did a very good job of incorporating US history into a broader world perspective. If you've had a bad high school experience, please do not generalize to the entirety of the US.

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