In the US, every state has their own history curriculum, so your mileage will vary. In NY, you take two years of "Global Studies:" in ninth grade, you learn about Africa and Asia and in tenth grade you learn about Europe, South America, and Australia. But it's a very brief overview. Then in eleventh grade, you study American history in-depth, and in twelfth grade you study American government, with a little bit about the history of different forms of government, for the first half of the year, and then a quick overview of basic economic principles in the second. So we learned who Gandhi was and what he did, but it was sandwiched in in the one week that we studied the whole history of India. I did learn more in my Humanities class, but that course is an elective, and my year we focused specifically on modern civil rights history-- we studied everything from women's suffrage to the Holocaust.
I also had a special program in my school where you could take a lot of social studies electives, so some gaps got filled in that way (we had one on Vietnam, for example), but even most of those were on American or European things-- I had a course on Mussolini and one on the Bolshevik Revolution. But yeah, I think it is really important not only to learn about where we live in the world but also to understand how white European privilege was constructed on a global scale over many years.
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Date: 2010-06-01 01:42 pm (UTC)I also had a special program in my school where you could take a lot of social studies electives, so some gaps got filled in that way (we had one on Vietnam, for example), but even most of those were on American or European things-- I had a course on Mussolini and one on the Bolshevik Revolution. But yeah, I think it is really important not only to learn about where we live in the world but also to understand how white European privilege was constructed on a global scale over many years.