Do average Americans have the kind of bias in historical education that Dan suggests?
Hell yes. One example: I remember being shocked as a teenager when, going to school outside the US for the first time, I learned that it took the US 100 years longer to free their slaves than Britain. My US education had made it out to be such a big deal that they’d been freed at all, that they neglected to mention that little detail.
Since I started this discussion, it’s only fair that I point out that the history classes in public schools here in Israel are very bad, too. (As are all the other subjects...)
We didn’t learn much world history that didn’t fall under the umbrella of “history as it applied to Jews”. We never even mentioned areas where there haven’t been many Jews, like all of South and East Asia. We also didn’t learn any regional (middle-east) history that wasn’t about Israel itself. And we didn’t learn any post-WW2 history outside Israel, presumably because all good Jews were supposed to have come to Israel then.
We did, though, predictably spend a lot of time on WW2.
Again, an anecdote. It is a piece of narrative representative to the idea that yes, US education is particularly self-embellishing (and thus evoking this connotation in the human mind, with availability and representativeness heuristics etc.), but it’s insignificant evidence towards concluding that. Argument-as-soldier, dark arts.
The problem with the argument remains the same no matter whether the conclusion is correct, and whether the intention is to enlighten or to deceive.
Hell yes. One example: I remember being shocked as a teenager when, going to school outside the US for the first time, I learned that it took the US 100 years longer to free their slaves than Britain. My US education had made it out to be such a big deal that they’d been freed at all, that they neglected to mention that little detail.
This still surprises me when I remember that I did not ever hear about other countries freeing their slaves in school.
Since I started this discussion, it’s only fair that I point out that the history classes in public schools here in Israel are very bad, too. (As are all the other subjects...)
We didn’t learn much world history that didn’t fall under the umbrella of “history as it applied to Jews”. We never even mentioned areas where there haven’t been many Jews, like all of South and East Asia. We also didn’t learn any regional (middle-east) history that wasn’t about Israel itself. And we didn’t learn any post-WW2 history outside Israel, presumably because all good Jews were supposed to have come to Israel then.
We did, though, predictably spend a lot of time on WW2.
Again, an anecdote. It is a piece of narrative representative to the idea that yes, US education is particularly self-embellishing (and thus evoking this connotation in the human mind, with availability and representativeness heuristics etc.), but it’s insignificant evidence towards concluding that. Argument-as-soldier, dark arts.
The problem with the argument remains the same no matter whether the conclusion is correct, and whether the intention is to enlighten or to deceive.