I minored in History in college.
I have seen current "college" books. They look like Jr. High level to me! I am no rocket scientist, believe me, but just wow!
They were not really revising history yet when I was a kid. But they really did not teach it either. We had Social Studies.
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I recall that from my own child’s HS years. They folded Civics into it, too. A friend with younger kids (late 30s-early 40s today)kept shocking me with tales of her children’s Social Studies assignments: Organize a protest from chants to signs!! Then the kids had to stage their *protest* out in the halls!
I still have the Great Books collection and a 1961 set of World Book Encyclopedia. The World Books are only good up until the late 1950s, of course, but they are fairly deep, as encyclopedias go.
I’m afraid you were taught by my generation (Silent Generation/earliest Boomers). Perhaps 40% were already radicals by the time you reached HS and even more by the 80s, when your cohort began college.
You guys were cheated, unless you were motivated enough to seek out prime sources, which still existed, then.
No, defcon, you’re no dummy. You seek out facts and put them in order. No one with curiosity is a dummy, especially not someone who can draw accurate conclusions from evidence.
As said: I was educated 1950s-1960s and I can barely handle arithmetic. Forget math. Thankfully, my cohort wasn’t expected to do Algebra 3 or calculus in HS unless we were in the top college preparatory classes for science. My strengths were always literature, history, writing, art, so I eeked by in math and science, except biology & botany. Those I got. My husband is younger than me, but he understands physics. We both are barely literate in chemistry, just what we had to learn later in life in order to deal with various production craft scenarios.