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.
Same here. Growing up, I was always amazed how much my parents knew, compared to what I was getting in school. They were high school grads – my father from Yonkers, NY and my mother from Stamford, CT (although my mother also had two years of college, my Dad's WWII service was a great equalizer, knowledge-wise). They shared very broad basic general knowledge due to required public education in the 1930s and 1940s: American and world history, Latin, geography, civics, grammar, literature, etc.
When anything happened in the news anywhere in the world in the 1960s and 70s, they both immediately had a context - where on the globe the news event was, and how the news fit into history - and some Latin aphorism to provide wisdom about it.
Even as a kid I recognized the difference between my education and theirs, and realized theirs was profoundly better.
My first protest/march, yes they did that in my day as well. I was in Kindergarten. Earth Day 1970. Course being a rather clueless child had no idea what we were doing.
Mostly I remember just being very confused most of my childhood. My parents were both the youngest in their families and their parents were much older than them. My parents were born in 42 and 43. So I don't know what that makes them. But I get the sense that if it were not for my grandmothers, I might not have survived. Blind leading the blind. (Parents). LOL
The elementary teachers (we moved a lot), but most of the ones I had were older. The exception was 5th grade. She was young and fun. Course then she left to get married.
Starting in Jr. High we started to get men who did not seem like the military type. High school was worse. In college, we actually would figure out which way they leaned and just tell them what they wanted to hear to get the grade. Now it would be hard for a kid to get the truth. We at least could still find the truth and not every teacher was a screaming lefty loon.
I would love to teach history but I know I would last about 5 minutes.