I’ve been out of school for about 15 years and history was not just memorization, but it was still super boring, because often enough the angles were completely irrelevant.
For example, here in Germany the whole Weimar/Third Reich period is rather important, and we spent hours “analyzing” diagrams of the different constitutional institutions in the different systems and their relevance to the later outcome. Maybe super important for polsci, but for teenagers utterly useless.
And what I personally find the most disturbing: you’re so drowned in Nazi stuff that you mentally go “yeah Hitler bad, yada yada yada”. That’s actually not only useless, but dangerous.
Here in the US, we had a pretty ordinary-feeling size WW2 curriculum, but I remember our History teacher taking out three days just for playing contemporary reels of the aftermath of the death camps, in total silence. It was very striking, I hope he still does it. If there was anything that drilled in the sheer inhumanity of those camps, it was seeing it.
I’ve been out of school for about 15 years and history was not just memorization, but it was still super boring, because often enough the angles were completely irrelevant.
For example, here in Germany the whole Weimar/Third Reich period is rather important, and we spent hours “analyzing” diagrams of the different constitutional institutions in the different systems and their relevance to the later outcome. Maybe super important for polsci, but for teenagers utterly useless.
And what I personally find the most disturbing: you’re so drowned in Nazi stuff that you mentally go “yeah Hitler bad, yada yada yada”. That’s actually not only useless, but dangerous.
Here in the US, we had a pretty ordinary-feeling size WW2 curriculum, but I remember our History teacher taking out three days just for playing contemporary reels of the aftermath of the death camps, in total silence. It was very striking, I hope he still does it. If there was anything that drilled in the sheer inhumanity of those camps, it was seeing it.