What did you learn about in History?

Worldly and otherworldly topics
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Utisz
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Re: What did you learn about in History?

Post by Utisz » Sat Apr 23, 2022 6:15 am

Mx7xM wrote:
Thu Apr 21, 2022 8:35 pm
I went to high school in Spain, and from memory the syllabus was quite broad across different civilizations and eras. My biggest educational gap is probably never having read Shakespeare, as Spain of course prioritised Cervantes and their own literature. Keenly interested in the psychology of Shakespearean characters, but no interest in acquiring the necessary vocabulary to read the plays.
Dodged a bullet there. Shakespeare is overrated!

Weird thing is that in Ireland we never touched Yeats, Wilde, Joyce, Beckett. Only some fogey Irish-language literature.

djm
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Re: What did you learn about in History?

Post by djm » Sat Apr 23, 2022 9:59 pm

I went to a shit comprehensive school in the UK in the 80s. Therefore I was subjected to a bunch of hard left teachers teaching how awful my country is, how everything bad in the world is due to capitalism.

Thankfully I had the good sense to see through their idiocy.

My own children will not be subjected to a state brainwashing.

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jyng1
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Re: What did you learn about in History?

Post by jyng1 » Sun Apr 24, 2022 1:25 am

Can't remember doing any history at school. I think it was supposed to be covered in Social Studies but don't think it was covered much there either. I found a report online which said when I was at school students taking history in 6th Form had dropped to 21% http://www.nzjh.auckland.ac.nz/docs/199 ... 4_2_05.pdf

New Zealand history has only just been disentangled from the Colonial British misinformation nonsense that held sway until historian Michael King wrote a concise NZ history and exposed it for what it was.

New Zealand History became compulsory in 2019 and the curriculum was approved just this year. It's been as controversial as you'd expect when millions of acres of indigenous land was taken in highly controversial circumstances and institutional racism has been in place for nearly 200 years...

This RNZ podcast of Parihaka is a good example of why teaching NZ history in NZ schools would be confronting for some students https://www.rnz.co.nz/audio/player?audio_id=20156440

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Madrigal
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Re: What did you learn about in History?

Post by Madrigal » Sun Apr 24, 2022 6:55 pm

Mx7xM wrote:
Thu Apr 21, 2022 8:35 pm
I went to high school in Spain, and from memory the syllabus was quite broad across different civilizations and eras. My biggest educational gap is probably never having read Shakespeare, as Spain of course prioritised Cervantes and their own literature. Keenly interested in the psychology of Shakespearean characters, but no interest in acquiring the necessary vocabulary to read the plays.
At some point in the pandemic I decided to read all of Shakespeare, grabbed a cheap copy of his complete works (not annotated xD), set myself down to read MacBeth and realized I could not. Project aborted.

I now want to think those witches were speaking in antiquated gibberish even in Shakespeare's day and that I should start again with another play.

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starjots
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Re: What did you learn about in History?

Post by starjots » Mon Apr 25, 2022 6:44 pm

History was one of my hobbies when I was young.

Elementary school was mostly geography, but that's history's first cousin and I often recall tidbits first learned in these years. Most of the other kids were throwing spit wads or eating their hair when the teachers said anything of actual interest.

In high school, world history was an elective (I was so excited to have this option). It was pretty weak -- I knew way more than he was teaching most of the time already.

American History was required for graduation and taught by someone who liked the subject. He covered a lot of ground and did a good job. This was the late 70s, so the labor movement, political struggles, indigenous populations etc were given a decent treatment.

Of course all of this was only scratching the surface of what an informed person should know IMO.

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C.J.Woolf
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Re: What did you learn about in History?

Post by C.J.Woolf » Mon Apr 25, 2022 6:57 pm

I best learned Shakespeare by watching the plays (or even just listening to audio) before reading them. My high school used an edition with the original text on the left page and annotation on the right. The words I didn't know didn't matter so much when the actors were saying them; I got the gist of it.

The only school history I remember is US history in high school. It spent a fair amount of time on the First Gilded Age -- the rise of the trusts, the trust busters, the struggles of labor unions, and the role of the Republican Party in all of it. It made me anti-Republican for life. This was in Massachusetts in the late 1970s, BTW. As for world history, I've read so much of it independently I don't remember what I was taught in school.

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starjots
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Re: What did you learn about in History?

Post by starjots » Mon Apr 25, 2022 7:18 pm

C.J.Woolf wrote:
Mon Apr 25, 2022 6:57 pm
The only school history I remember is US history in high school. It spent a fair amount of time on the First Gilded Age -- the rise of the trusts, the trust busters, the struggles of labor unions, and the role of the Republican Party in all of it. It made me anti-Republican for life. This was in Massachusetts in the late 1970s, BTW.
The First Gilded Age -- subtle :) I was too stupid to become anti-Republican despite receiving the same education. When the wheel of history turned in 1980, I helped nudge it along and the US began the Second Gilded Age.

djm
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Re: What did you learn about in History?

Post by djm » Thu Jul 28, 2022 10:27 pm

jyng1 wrote:
Sun Apr 24, 2022 1:25 am
Can't remember doing any history at school. I think it was supposed to be covered in Social Studies but don't think it was covered much there either. I found a report online which said when I was at school students taking history in 6th Form had dropped to 21% http://www.nzjh.auckland.ac.nz/docs/199 ... 4_2_05.pdf

New Zealand history has only just been disentangled from the Colonial British misinformation nonsense that held sway until historian Michael King wrote a concise NZ history and exposed it for what it was.

New Zealand History became compulsory in 2019 and the curriculum was approved just this year. It's been as controversial as you'd expect when millions of acres of indigenous land was taken in highly controversial circumstances and institutional racism has been in place for nearly 200 years...

This RNZ podcast of Parihaka is a good example of why teaching NZ history in NZ schools would be confronting for some students https://www.rnz.co.nz/audio/player?audio_id=20156440
The British Empire is the best thing that ever happened to NZ, and the world in general. When we got there the very sparse polynesian population was starving to death and located in small areas. NZ is what it is now soley to Britain.

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jyng1
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Re: What did you learn about in History?

Post by jyng1 » Fri Jul 29, 2022 8:27 am

djm wrote:
Thu Jul 28, 2022 10:27 pm
The British Empire is the best thing that ever happened to NZ, and the world in general. When we got there the very sparse polynesian population was starving to death and located in small areas. NZ is what it is now soley to Britain.

Yeah, there's still a lot of that English racist nonsense floating around.

It was probably the justification for several Englishmen in Parliament in 1881 to call for the extermination of the Maori race as a whole and the Pacifist settlement in Parihaka in particular. The capture and incarceration 1,000 kms away from their homes in the cold hell of Dunedin of pacifist chiefs Rongamai and Tohu for simply occupying their land is something similar to what the Nazi's tried to do in WWII (only it was successful).

The whole land confiscation after the Maori wars simply being the English settlers not wanting to be tenant farmers with a landowner class like they were at home hence the stealing of $400 billion worth of land.

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