I agree with you that they should teach everything about it. I personally don't feel that they would though. What would people make out of the fact that millions died in India because of Churchill's negligence or rather refusal to send food? Would they believe it or would the government be willing to teach them? They are not even accepting the responsibility for what is happening now in the Windrush scandal.
75 Years Since Hitler's Death
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I agree with you that they should teach everything about it. I personally don't feel that they would though. What would people make out of the fact that millions died in India because of Churchill's negligence or rather refusal to send food? Would they believe it or would the government be willing to teach them? They are not even accepting the responsibility for what is happening now in the Windrush scandal.
Absolutely.
As I told @esmufc07 , Longerich is seen as a top German Holocaust scholar by the likes of Kershaw and Evans. This convo has made me want to get a copy of his bio on Goebbels as well.
It wasn't a uniform national curriculum when I did my GCSEs- different educational boards had their own courses.
I didn't do colonialism or WWII- we did ancient Greece, Henry VIII and the English Civil War mainly.
I didn't do WWII and the end of empire til undergrad as part of a 20th century Europe core course.
Yall didn't do something like survey courses?
The nearest my teachers allowed us to get to the subject of World Wars was their thrilling discussion of the Treaty of Versailles. Yawn.
I remember being out in Berlin and getting back to the hostel off my face on all sorts, got back at about 7am and then my mate who got back far, far earlier dragged me straight back out to go to that car park.
I remember lying there thinking.. I can't believe fecking Hitler died here and now it consists of me flat on my back in absolute tatters. It was surreal
Did he really speak like that in the way it is shown in the movies? It's really funny how he is shown in the movies.
Nein.
Rubbish artist.
British comics have a lot to answer for - I grew up thinking that all Germans marched about saying "Achtung!", "Schnell!" & "Schweinhund!"
It is much more important to know about the causes and effects of the World Wars than what actually went on in them. With some exceptions, like genocide.
You're right, I'm sure, but I sensed a reluctance to discuss the 'meat' of WWII; almost as if it might be bad for (future) business with our 'European trading partners' as one teacher put it while being held at gunpoint by politicians.
I was never sure whether pig-dogs were real animals or not.
Nor me, 'til I tried Pukka pies.
Survey courses? Not sure what they are.
I had one for the first time last night - chicken and gravy. The meat was a struggle to put it politely.History courses that cover a broad range of regions / time so you have a baseline of knowledge to build upon with more specific courses.
I.e. "Modern World History - 1200 CE to Present"
A friend had one of their curry-flavoured ones; he named it 'slurry'.No- it tended to be more zoomed in for whatever reason, eg the Stuarts or Tudors, Napoleonic France or say the cold war. 1200 to present covers a lot of ground!
No way am I ever trying that, even if it's the only thing left after a corona apocalypse.
That's another of their flavours.
Not sure about England but in Scotland when I was in school around 10 years ago it was very specific based. British Politics from the late 1800s to 1970 was about as broad as it got for me.
As I said there seems to be a reluctance to go back in time and talk about certain pieces of British history. In Scotland we touched upon the Highland clearances, Irish Famine and the Picts (very briefly) but aside from that you'd have been able to believe that the British Empire barely existed.
That's crazy to me. It goes completely against the teaching point that "history doesn't happen in a vacuum". You've got to have contextual knowledge and a baseline in order to really understand the in depth courses.
Even in colleges / universities your freshman year you take "World Civ (Year - Year)" and "Modern World Civ (Year - Year)". That's actually the course I teach to my AP kids so they can go ahead and get those credit hours out of the way.
You had it good. Indonesians sometimes still wished it was the British empire that colonized them than the dutch.
Let's face it, history are written by the winners. And to be fair what Hitler did was too heavy for elementary school basic history. I think by the junior high / senior high we've past WWII. Probably I'm just too young to understand what Hitler did back then.
@Kopral Jono You still remember our history lesson mate?
For me in WWII the Eastern Front, maybe the largest conflict in history, was just a blip on the radar...a surprise attack that fizzled out. And China was just chilling on the sidelines without anything much really happening.
A good chunk of China was under Japanese occupation and then they were embroiled in a civil war.
I know that now. But I didn’t know that from just before the start of the war in Europe until the end of it in Japan, several million people died in China.
Now that you mention it there was a massive famine as well but I can't recall if it was pre, during or post war. Maybe all three..
We had a bit of that, in that parliament pushing Charles I was rooted in part back to the reformation etc...grabbing of foreign policy under James I and so on, but if you're covering such a vast period, it must be fairly superficial to cram it all in. I liked the in-depth look at say revolutionary France- such a crazy time and worth a deeper dive. You do end up with massive blindspots, eg American history is an obvious one for me and we learnt nothing at all about Asian history- was very white history in hindsight.
My history degree had the broader module, eg 20th century Europe as core, then you could specialise through the optional modules. Masters was the same.
Survey courses are more superficial... but they're supposed to be. You've got to lay the foundation before you can build the house.
I think it depends on who wrote the history. BE history only shows the good side of it. But the reality is much different. I presume it's the same for other countries too. The brutality of the conquering nation's brought unimaginable misery to all these countries. It is still going on even these days but under different names. Look at Libya, Iraq and even Syria.
What did the Iraqis and the Libyans actually do to the people of USA and EU? Nothing. Yes their country has been destroyed beyond recognition. They were one of the most progressive countries in the middle East.
What did the Iraqis and the Libyans actually do to the people of USA and EU? Nothing. Yes their country has been destroyed beyond recognition. They were one of the most progressive countries in the middle East.
All of my history courses in NC public schools were survey courses over a long period of time. Of course they'd focus on some specific things for longer than others (pirates in 4th grade), but I don't see how schools teach history without the providing the foundational outline. Understanding the broad ideas and social trends of history are key to being able to put history into context. The biggest problem with the survey courses is that they inevitably skimp on the more recent history as the school year ends. I'm not sure AP US History got much past the civil rights movement and Vietnam.
I don't understand how you teach history without establishing context. Often the context and social movements are more important than the specifics of who, when, and where, especially with more ancient history. We had a variety of world history, US history, and NC history from about 4th grade on. The textbooks and courses had their flaws (Eurocentric, limited coverage of recent history, etc.), but they gave a decent idea of where things fit.
Sounds very similar to how the history curriculum is set up in South Carolina.
To give a better idea @Jippy , here are our state standards...
https://ed.sc.gov/index.cfm?LinkServID=9677E07B-CFFE-6A5C-AA47F98625149ABC
Some of it, yes. Basic elementary school stuff because we moved to Singapore as a family as I entered junior high.
And the Dutch were a nasty piece of work alright, and if we're being completely honest they've left us with far-reaching psychological scar which is manifested through a large number of maladies in Indonesian society today. The Dutch left us with nothing and were looters at best and genocidal at worst, at the very least the British (partly due to their belief in the racist 'white man's burden' nonsense) were interested in setting up things like infrastructure and legal framework in their colonies. I'd say only the Belgians were worse than the Dutch in this department.
Not always. Lost Cause and Clean Wehrmacht are both very good examples of the losers writing the histories.
Wasn’t the myth of the clean Wehrmacht fostered in part by the Allies after the war to help with the rehabilitation of the FRG under Adenauer though? They wanted to anchor most of the guilt of the Nazi crimes purely on Hitler and the other leading Nazis for Cold War expediency
Yes, that's absolutely a large part of it, but that's how a lot of these go. Lost Cause is also only a thing because it was allowed to be a thing, because it was expedient in the face of opposition to Reconstruction. They're still very real, though, and have led to a lot of misinformation. Another one is that the West was all too ready to believe the claims of the German generals, since their main opponent (the Soviet Union) was now our main opponent.
So the West very nearly fell into the same trap that the Nazis did before Barbarossa, believing that the Soviet military was weaker than it actually was (If only Hitler hadn't gotten in our way! We only lost because of the Russian winter! The Soviets only won because they had endless manpower to throw at us! The Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse!)