this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2025
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American here. In high school, I noticed the publishing dates on our history books were older than the freshmen (the youngest grade in most high schools, usually 14 year old.) Those books were falling apart so bad. It was the only book we weren't allowed to take home - they were too fragile and there weren't enough for every student.
Our history classes conveniently stopped covering anything that happened in the 80s or later anyway. I had to learn about the horrors of Reagan as an adult, through my own studies. Considering how much he did to bring about the enshittified world we live in today, some part of me can't help but feel that missing that history lesson was not a coincidence.
So just to give some hope, when I was in high school, my highschool had a really cool setup for the history classes clearly designed to address this problem of history books aging poorly and not enough time in a school year to reasonably cover history. They instead broke history class into 4 separate classes that you take one each year of highschool. First year covered conflict of the first settlers and native people through to the year 1900, second year covered 1900-1950 third year covered 1950-1980 and the final year covered 1980-present, so not only did I get to learn about events like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire and Watergate but also we talked about the War on Terror (because I was also born in the 90s) and many of Bush Jr's policies
Obviously being in public school, they took a relatively safe approach to covering some of the stickier topics (I specifically remember being royally confused when learning about the Red Scare and kinda going "wait, but what is so bad about communism?" Or the talk about Desert Storm, Desert Shield, and later the Iraq war wasn't as clear about just how pointless those wars were than they could have been. Or the talk about Reagan didn't cover so much of his devastating policies, or the Watergate scandal was basically framed as "Nixon was kinda quirky and didn't trust people!" etc.) but it at least gave an incredible baseline of historical background to understand most US policies from and a baseline to fill in with my own research later on in life (which I absolutely have! Learning more about practices of Mercantilism in the 16th-18th centuries really brings all of the colonialism and enslavement of "lesser" peoples into clarity, or learning in more depth about Nixon's and later Reagan's policies and how they influenced the modern era. How Roger Ailes worked with the Nixon and Reagan administrations and from that experience turned Fox News into the Republican party trumpet that it is today, etc. etc.)
Lol, reminds of Trevor Moore's "Geniuses":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jx8b6RzvC_Y