D.Turtle wrote:Frankly. time is always a big problem when teaching history. There simply isn't enough time to deeply cover large parts of history. At that point you basically have two choices: quickly skim over large parts of history, or choose a few exemplary parts and cover them well. Now, I'm not sure how exactly the situation is in the US with regards to how much influence the teacher has in that choice. Here in Germany, it largely depends on what school type you are teaching in. Depending on the school type and class here in Germany you might have one school year in which you cover history from antiquity to today, including the political system (theoretically some of that should be repetition). There you can basically only choose one topic and look at how that changed through history (the role of women, or human rights, for example).
History teachers in the US might have more control than teachers of some other subjects, because there's no "No Child Left Behind" tests (i.e. national standardized tests) for history. On the other hand, there are state-level requirements. They may mandate that you teach world history in 10th grade, US history in 11th, and so on, and they'll also decide on more specific things that students are expected to know on state standardized tests. Some states are stricter about this than others.
Also, teachers are always limited by their textbooks, which are often limited by other states' history standards. California and Texas are the two biggest buyers of textbooks, so their standards tend to dictate the content of those textbooks. (California is pretty okay, but Texas pulls
shit like this.) Even if, say, the New Jersey school board and teachers are completely sane, New Jersey teachers might be forced to use textbooks that conform to the Texas standards, because that's what's in the current edition of McGraw-Hill's US history textbook. If they're lucky, there'll be one that's more California than Texas. And some of them will ignore their textbooks, like Red did. (There's a neat book called
Lies My Teacher Told Me that examines popular American history textbooks and finds them overly sympathetic to Confederates, among other flaws.)
If you only have very little time to cover the American civil war, for example, simply saying it was about slavery is good enough. There is some additional stuff besides that that lead to the American civil war, but its almost all consequences from slavery. States' rights was only important for the South regarding slavery. They were willing to ignore it if it worked in favor of slavery. Similarly, the poor people in the South were either politically irrelevant and also profiting from slavery - though only a relatively tiny minority directly owned slaves a large majority was involved directly or indirectly involved in the usage of slaves - things like working as overseers, etc. Enough seceding states made it clear that the primary factor leading to secession was slavery. Simplifying that to it was all because of slavery is fine, in my opinion.
Yup. The line that "the US Civil War wasn't about slavery, it was about states' rights" is somewhere between a false dilemma, a distraction, and a straight-up lie.
Teachers of American history never have enough time to teach everything they want in a year. However, they always spend a disproportionate amount of time on wars, and usually more time on the US Civil War than any other event. Your typical high school history teacher might do a two-week unit on the Civil War, so he or she can afford to spend one lecture on the causes and motives of the parties involved. Often teachers say a lot of the things you said, but sometimes they don't. I'd expect the explanations to vary regionally, with Southern teachers and textbooks more likely to repeat the "states' rights" canard and other tropes of Confederate apologism, and Northern ones more likely to gloss over the fact that the Union did not initially go to war to free slaves. On the other hand, Red has regaled me with tales of Confederate apologism in Northern states' textbooks, and
Lies My Teacher Told Me criticizes books used across the country, so who knows.
