If I can point to any obvious failing in my public education, the biggest one is that history never got far enough along. World history never got beyond World War I, and American history had the same problem. Everything that I know about WWII, Vietnam, the 60's and 70's, I learned after, and probably not in a very complete way. If others had a similar experience, not learning about the Holocaust, the formation of the Soviet Union, etc., it's a real disservice for us. That's not to say that there weren't positives. I think America's first century was pretty well covered, and my experience in post-desegregation Cleveland schools included really rich Ohio history in elementary school. I actually learned about the Western Reserve and the division of 5 by 5 mile townships.
My American history class, as far as it went, was fairly robust for what it was. It reminds me a lot of the Hamilton documentary on PBS years ago, where the actors point out that for all of the greatness of the founding fathers, they were also terrible people who owned slaves, and many defended the practice. The curriculum that I experienced was relatively fair about that. And even my autism brain, which can sometimes struggle to reconcile things that seem too opposite to coexist, found this paradox fascinating. I learned in a setting with an American flag in every classroom, and in those cold war days, it was clear that the "bad guys" were the communists of China and the Soviet Union. Granted, I'm sure some of that sentiment was lingering carryover from McCarthyism, and while I've contemplated the merits of such systems as an adult (or lack thereof, since it's a broken system), it's unfortunate that we never had those thought exercises in school.
The American paradox is that this nation founded by immigrants, searching for freedom from a tyrannical king, would be so terrible to various groups of people. Almost 250 years in, it's still happening. It started with Indigenous and Black people, but in waves it has included Catholics, Jews, Muslims, various Europeans , Asians, Middle Easterners, Latinos, LGBTQ folks and others. It's not a good look, but for now, I want to focus on the history itself.
These systemic "-isms" are real. They happened. I wasn't alive in the Nineteenth Century, and none of us were, so I don't see any reason to feel ashamed about it. I can appreciate that the model of democracy that we enjoy (well, usually) has generally been durable and a model for other nations. I can also appreciate that the nation's record on discrimination is pretty poor. To accept that both of these are true is not unpatriotic. I think patriotism is understanding the paradox, accepting it, and doing our best to right it. We'll all reach a day where our heart stops beating, we stop breathing, and die. This too, is an inescapable fact. With that in mind, shouldn't our legacy be to leave the world better than we found it? Most people genuinely understand right from wrong, and I doubt any honest person could claim that marginalizing groups of people is right.
We all know the old adage that, "Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it." I can't find a definitive answer on who said that first, but it has been repeated by many historical figures. American history as a whole is deeply uncomfortable. I had to take a bus to school across town to mix the Black and white kids to make sure they had equal educational opportunities. This thing that adults couldn't get right had the side effect of me seeing less about race until I moved to a mostly white school, where I was in my first week called a "n-word lover" because I came from the inner city. Maybe I was fortunate to gain that perspective.
There was a movement in US colleges for awhile that promoted "safe spaces" for students, where they could avoid topics that made them uncomfortable. Folks on the right found this laughable, calling them "liberal snowflakes." But now the same folks are worried that the things that make them uncomfortable shouldn't be taught in schools. Those topics shouldn't be found in libraries. In the greatest irony, uncomfortable subjects shouldn't be taught in universities. They have become the arbiters of the very danger that they mocked before.
American history is fraught with violence and hate. In that sense, it is not unique compared to most of the world's history. It doesn't mean the nation isn't great, but it definitely means that we can do better. Abolition was controversial at one time, and we literally had to go to war with ourselves to get beyond that. We've made most kinds of discrimination illegal, but it still happens. Our history is bad and good, and we can learn from it. What we can't do is avoid it, or pretend it didn't happen, just because it makes some people uncomfortable.
I've written about this sort of thing before. Here are a few examples:
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