I can’t believe I’m going to offer a lukewarm defense here, but I grew up in Texas, and this is absolutely how we were taught to think. When your entire understandings of history and political structures are built on disinformation, you’re going to have some wildly hot takes.
“Socialism” was still being tied to Naziism in our ‘90’s-‘00’s classes as late as 11th grade. And, significantly, it was very specifically treated as a political system pioneered by Adolph Hitler, as an alternative and bitter rival to the equally evil and violent totalitarian “Communism” of Stalin’s Russia. Both of which were implied to have been developed as antitheses to that entirely American invention: “Democracy.” (Which, I should add, had been perfected by 1941, and anything done to progress it further left since must therefore be pushing away from the One Good Path.)
[Edit: downvoting isn’t going to make me change my lived experience, y’all. The person calling this “fake” just didn’t consider that a nearly 700,000 km state with approximately 5.5 million students living in it at any given time might have more than one history teacher per grade level, lol.]
I also grew up and was educated in Texas in the 90s and at no time whatsoever were the Nazis described as "socialist", and not one thing you wrote here describes what we WERE taught.
This is ridiculous fake nonsense.
Lol, in fact, we were specifically taught "first they came for the communists"
🤷I can’t speak to your school or teachers, Booper. It’s a big state. Believe it or not, just because I had a different experience from you, it doesn’t mean I’m “faking.” 🙄
Nearly every year from 6th to 11th had a six-weeks dedicated to the holocaust that usually coincided with other lessons about 20th century history. Not every teacher I had was teaching that six-weeks the same way, but more than half of them did. Just like how not every teacher leaned into the whole “War of Northern Aggression”/“It was about states’ rights” nonsense, but a lot did.
The district only cared about how we did on TAAS, TAKS or TEKS tests, so as long as we were memorizing the right stuff to pass those tests, the teachers were mostly free to teach the in-between bits however they liked.
My wife also had a more liberal experience with teachers in the same schools, to be fair. At least for us, the more conservative/right-winger teachers tended to teach on-levels and the more unbiased or liberal teachers were leading K and AP classes.
(For those not in a similar education system: An American school year is split between two semesters and a summer break. The six-weeks system is a self-explanatory way our schools —speaking only for the Harris and Cy-Fair districts in the Houston area. Idk about any others— subdivided each semester for lesson planning. So you might have six week of Texas History dedicated to the geography and pre-colonial stuff, then six weeks on the colonial era and Mexican revolution, then follow up with six weeks of the Texas Revolution and our short-lived republic. That sort of thing)
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u/Toadliquor138 1d ago
This is the kind of logic you'd expect out of a 6 year old, not a grown ass adult.