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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ledded" data-source="post: 1198433" data-attributes="member: 12744">I have to agree somewhat on what we are taught.  Twenty-something years ago, the education I received in history was so entirely Anglo-Northern-European-centric that you would have thought that while the euro-revered Greeks were inventing philosophy, bureaucracy and all kinds of coolness, people in China, India, and pretty much everywhere else where still rolling about in their own feces and grunting while painting on cave walls with burned sticks.  Of course, the arabians got props for later creating Algebra, but hey nobody really likes algebra and someone would have done that during the Renaissance anyway, right?  But then there was the 'Dark Ages' where *everybody in the world worth knowing* was all goofy and mixed up on science and history and we'd really not like to go into detail about how silly those guys were.  Silly buggers.  And then that Columbus, what a nice guy going about exploring and sailing ocean blue and civilizing all of those cultureless savages along the way.  /SARCASM OFF  I know we cant teach kids everything, and you really dont get a lot of the detail until much later in your education, however that seems to be the time when people (on average) start paying less attention to it.  I've always been a bit of a history/science buff, and I've spent most of my adult life trying to untangle the old-school-anglo-government spin on history we were indoctrinated with.  Thank God I had a few very good history teachers in college who weren't afraid to (literally) throw away the books and just teach you *history*.I havent been in an EC or middle school classroom in a while (not since my wife was teaching) but I hope that we have gotten better, at least a little.  I'm almost afraid to look. It's funny... my wife of course thinks I'm nuts when I complain about how stupid a lot of people seem to be nowadays, especially when you see these Jay Leno segments where they ask the most simple questions and get the most idiotic answers.  Once I was ranting about it, and my wife looked over and said "Wow.  You must think you are really smart to be calling those people out as so stupid" and I replied "No, the reason I'm so pissed is that I *don't* think I'm very smart".</blockquote>

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