Comment by drakythe
9 hours ago
No, but I do think it more likely they got a more accurate world history class somewhere along the line. I was taught creationism thanks to the conservatism nature of my family and the area I grew up in. It took a long while to know and accept the world (and universe) is as old as it is.
I went through public elementary and high school. The amount of world history taught there is vanishingly small.
Just for fun, ask some high schoolers who were the major combatants in WW2.
> The amount of world history taught there is vanishingly small. Just for fun, ask some high schoolers who were the major combatants in WW2.
That is an example of poor teaching of historical facts. It's bad (especially in our current times when people have forgotten the perils of fascism), but it's different than what the GP describes, which sounds like the biblical literalist timeline of life on Earth (with creation happening only 6000 years ago).
That is not just poor education, but instead direct contradiction of widely understood knowledge that much of our modern world is built on.
To use your WW2 example, it's similar to explicitly teaching someone that the Holocaust didn't happen. Or in the scientific realm teaching that the earth is flat.
I've also seen "history" taught in high school that the middle class only emerged after FDR.
(The middle class thrived in colonial America.)
Freshman physics in college blew through 2 years of high school honors physics in a week.
What's taught in public schools is pretty thin gruel. That said, I enjoyed school, as all my friends were there and we had a good time.