To be fair, as we've discussed before, a lot of this is the terrible American approach to history in school. The only history I had learned in school before salon was really US history (up to 1920 or so, lol); everything else I might know even a little bit about, like Henry VIII or the French Revolution, was stuff I'd picked up from outside reading but definitely not from the school curriculum. My best friend went to a better school system and she has a much better grounding in world history in general.
My kids go to a school that is progressive in a way that is great in some ways (socioemotionally, which is the most important for E and why we're there) but even more awful for history. I don't think E knows any history except that they did the Renaissance this year, and they have done "Colonial America" and "Westward Expansion" portions of American history in past years, which she remembers almost nothing about.
ETA: I just remembered that I was playing a game with E's classmate's family a couple of weeks ago, and I tried to use the word "Elizabethan" as a clue in the game, because I knew they'd studied Shakespeare during their Renaissance unit. Neither E nor her classmate had ever heard the word, which makes me very suspicious about what history they've done and what they'll remember.
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Re: Iconography
Date: 2023-01-08 10:51 pm (UTC)To be fair, as we've discussed before, a lot of this is the terrible American approach to history in school. The only history I had learned in school before salon was really US history (up to 1920 or so, lol); everything else I might know even a little bit about, like Henry VIII or the French Revolution, was stuff I'd picked up from outside reading but definitely not from the school curriculum. My best friend went to a better school system and she has a much better grounding in world history in general.
My kids go to a school that is progressive in a way that is great in some ways (socioemotionally, which is the most important for E and why we're there) but even more awful for history. I don't think E knows any history except that they did the Renaissance this year, and they have done "Colonial America" and "Westward Expansion" portions of American history in past years, which she remembers almost nothing about.
ETA: I just remembered that I was playing a game with E's classmate's family a couple of weeks ago, and I tried to use the word "Elizabethan" as a clue in the game, because I knew they'd studied Shakespeare during their Renaissance unit. Neither E nor her classmate had ever heard the word, which makes me very suspicious about what history they've done and what they'll remember.