#high school prepares you to
from observations, I feel like many people took “history books are full of propaganda” and ran with it and instead of more deeply investigating history from varying sources, they just don’t know jack shit about history
I need everyone that has ever talked about “overthrowing capitalism” to understand that
- people have tried to create a peaceful, oppression-free society before, but it turns out that’s really hard.
- The reasons it’s really hard are almost entirely practical and many of them are the boring and logistical sort of practical.
- Change happens incrementally. Revolutions and revolts…they happen when people hit the breaking point. But the idea that they throw out an old society completely and create a new one from scratch is itself propaganda. They don’t always result in a better society. They always result in a deeply flawed society. Also people die. Very often the most powerful people don’t die, and sometimes they end up powerful in the new society.
also there are things you didn’t learn about in history class that nobody was trying to hide from you
(there are definitely things some people sometimes ARE trying to hide from you, and that was even more true in the pre-Internet days when it was easier. I’m not saying it never happens. but it’s not always the reason)
if your teacher is trying to cover all of…I don’t know, Modern European History™, they might not have time- between wars and economic crises that impacted the fate of nations -to get into Virginia Woolf’s gay love letters. that doesn’t mean they’re ~hiding her as part of a homophobic conspiracy~. it just means they have a lot to cram into like six months to give teenagers some vague understanding of the events that shaped our society
I see a lot of people on here like “why didn’t I learn about [historical figure who is important in the history of an oppressed group but didn’t have a huge impact on the Big Picture of the world] in school?” and other people responding “you know why…” and like
sometimes. but definitely not always
people do their PhDs on getting into the nitty gritty of this stuff, even undergraduates are asked to write about specifics in papers. high school is meant to be a foundational level, you were learning the foundation.if your learning stopped in high school (and I’m not even talking about university here, you can learn outside of uni and college) then things weren’t hidden from you, you just weren’t looking.
for some things anyways, suppression definitely happens, but if you’re leaving a comment on a public widely shared post saying ‘why didn’t we learn about this in high school’ then it’s not a suppression conspiracy anymore, some scholar did the work and it’s freely available and being relayed to you.
it’s just likely a specific topic that was not on that foundational level yet, thus not learned in high school.
