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Comment by gammateam | Hacker News Reader

We're right because we won.

I wonder if it is necessary for school books to elevate a cause as 'just', to children, to keep their support of the nation or outcome. Why not just teach the relative morality of these outcomes?

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I was in highschool in the United States 20 years ago, and middle school just before that. We learned a wide range of history, including every war the USA has taken part in (for example, the american revolution).

At no point did textbook or teacher make any assertion about the morality/immorality/justice/injustice of any particular side in any of them.

I also went to high school in the United States 20 years ago, and have parsed my experience very differently than you. There were many morality and justice declarations about everyone but the United States, and then just...silence about the morality of US actions. They wouldn't say the US did wrong under any circumstances.

I didn't learn about the firebombing of Dresden from History class, I learned about it from Vonnegut. I may have learned about the bombing of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in my history class, but their moral dimension was summed up by "It made Japan surrender," which is ahistorical bullshit. I didn't learn about the Tuskegee syphilis experiment at all, nor much at all about the racial prejudice that dominated American culture for a hundred years after the civil war (and continues to have lasting effects today).

American History as taught in US high schools is hagiographic, make no mistake about it.

It sounds like maybe not all US high schools follow the same curriculum. Mind sharing what state you were in?

Surely you learned about the Trail of Tears, Slavery, and the Vietnam War?

Here in New England I can tell you that I came out of 10th grade admiring Ho Chi Minh and despising Andrew Jackson.

Did you learn about the time we used cavalry and tanks to repel 43,000 of our own WWI veterans who were protesting their lack of promised bonus payouts, killing a couple of them in the process? See the “Bonus Army”.

You can avoid moral stickers but still be biased if you selectively choose which events to dive into.

I did - and I was in high school 30 years ago. When I asked my dad about it; he also knew about it.

I learned this too, in public high school in the south. Did you not receive this in your education?

To some degree every country engages in propagandising history lessons for elementary school children. (e.g. Japan depicting itself as morally right in WWII in its curricula), but the USA takes it to the next level: Post civil war, the US government undertook the construction of a kind of pseudo religion, in an effort to unite the very divided post civil war country. So we have various legends about the founding fathers, the story of thanksgiving, the "pledge of allegiance" based loosely on the lord's prayer, and so on.

The whole thing of course, relies on an inherent ambiguity in these legends and ideals, which allows a hugely diverse country to project their own values onto them, and interpret them in a way that feels right- like the entire country believes in the same thing, when really we all believe very different things and are able to see those different beliefs in the same set of stories.

It's all kind of fractured apart since the invention of the internet. That illusion of common beliefs is hard to maintain when we can actually all talk to each other.

How is the pledge of allegiance based on the Lord’s Prayer?

Same cadence.

That nuanced view emerges a little bit more in higher education, usually US history starts as rosy as a marvel movie and slowly gets more... sophisticated as time goes on.

Even college level philosophy on the other hand.. largely moral absolutists built upon a religious foundation as opposed to say a psychological foundation.

Because children simply do not have the knowledge, experience, or perspective to be taught such advanced concepts. For example, children think their parents are gods.

Besides, every generation in America has rewritten their view of the events in the American Revolution. Your view is as ephemeral as the rest.

Adults do not see it much different, look at all of the explanations the Smithsonian article has to give just to help people break through the distortion field to understand why these people did what they did.

There was a plan by British colonists to stop an insurrection and treason. It didn't work, and it resulted in secession and eventual sovereign immunity preventing any further prosecution, led by the very man they did not kill. If you break the law but win your cause you get sovereign immunity, but there are still consequences, children already understand this. The teenagers that win their nation state understand this, the ones that lose understand this.

Does the American story need to be taught as "but we're the good guys"? How did we get to this outcome and were alternatives hurtful to the union? Was that a problem?

Kids who still believe in Santa Claus and read Superman comics (if they read at all) are simply not going to have the background needed to discuss moral subtleties. They're not little adults. They have undeveloped, ignorant minds. You can't teach calculus before arithmetic.

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