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Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

In the US there are large regional differences in what is taught, especially when it comes to history topics. So some of the difference might be that your state had a more comprehensive approach to history than the commenters' states.

But yes, most people have a really bad memory of what's taught in school (and that probably isn't entirely their fault, the system clearly doesn't lead to sticky knowledge).

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It isn't just state differences either, because schools are mostly funded by property taxes, areas that serve a more expensive area of properties receives way more funding. While an area that serves all cheap property gets dog shit in funding. The area I grew up in was mostly farms but had one lake that was way overly priced compared to everywhere else, a new development of cookie cutter houses but they were 4-5 times the price of other property around. And the school there was excellent, and had I not ever moved I would of assumed that was the standard public education quality level. But I moved schools in highschool to another mostly rural school 2 hours away, but they didn't have the new development well-off lake community, and despite being in the same state, the poorer school was literally 3-4 years behind in education and had a third of the material supplies and teachers were paid significantly less and thus were mostly of far lower quality. So that my senior year in the poorer school was essentially having what I learned in 8th and 9ths grade repeated to me my senior year, but of course for the locals that was the first time many of them heard those things.

> areas that serve a more expensive area of properties receives way more funding.

This actually isn't true in general. Baltimore (poor city) city schools, eg, spend twice as much as Carmel Indiana (wealthy city) does per pupil.

The link between education outcomes and spend is extremely weak.

They didn't teach this in high school!!!

My ex who loved history had to learn about it all on her own because she just got civil war history over and over and over. She wasn't even in the proper South. Though I'd get punched for saying that anywhere anyone could here.

Agreed - I was shocked to discover NY State curriculum has nothing about Native Peoples. I mean, the five nations were influential on early colonial life.

The scots educational curriculum is sufficiently different to the English that I had significant difficulty at (an English) University, because of assumptions about what was learned.

Also, time changes things. I did school during a period where school history was in ferment and the teacher said at some points we were learning a new curriculum which rejected "great men of history" theory and focussed on mass movements. I suspect after Thatcher this was revised, it was almost overtly marxist. The textbooks on post colonialism were pretty clear.

I hasten to add I had no problem with this, and I read "the 18th Brumaire of Louis Buonaparte" as revision for the history exam in the library, with much pleasure. This was because we'd done a lot on the revolutions across Europe in 1848. Strangely we did very little on Chartism. When I went to uni I found out this was a really active field of study, especially in the midlands because so many Chartist pamphlets are held by places like Leeds university, the working class towns. Maybe thats why Scots History ignored it: it was a south of the border story! If they'd done the emergence of the British Labour party I bet we'd have had a lot given the origins of Labour in Scotland, and the Red Clyde story. That was probably done in year 12 and I left school early to go work in a Marine Biology lab.

I probably remember this because I enjoyed it. A lot of history doesn't excite everyone, perhaps I was lucky. I am buggered if I can remember the Maths, which isn't very helpful given I work in CS. Like Arnold Rimmer in "Red Dwarf" I am acceptably meh at colouring in the crinkly bits in Geography but not much else.

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