Without knowledge of history, and therefore context, it's easy for a population to be controlled.

This is understood. History (and the humanities) are being removed from the curriculum in many western high schools.

At it's most basic:

a/ "Hey Venezuela looks fucked, Socialism must be a fucked system."

b/ "Venezuela is still suffering from the effects of Imperialism, colonialism and foreign intervention in South America. Let's try socialism somewhere without interference"

One of these people learned some historical context.

The zoomers and the generation behind them are learning less than we did about history. That's gonna fuck up the future. A population like that is easily kept reactionary and conservative.

How do we popularize the teaching of the true full history of the 20th century, in and out of schools?

I know that, for me, Radio War Nerd was massively educational.

  • glimmer_twin [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Has history education really reached such a poor level? That’s crazy. I live in Australia and I’m not sure how the curriculum is these days, been out of school ten years.

    • sunlit_uplands [none/use name]
      ·
      4 years ago

      I was speaking to someone at high school level where history has been made an optional subject. Students can ditch it entirely and choose something like broadcast studies (playing with AV equipment) instead.

      Seems to me like it's an extremely serious issue at a societal level. Conservatives have realized that education is not a panacea and is detrimental to their world view. There's a reason they hold onto control of curriculums tight as possible.

    • claz [comrade/them]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Graduated from a top-ranking selective high school in NSW, and did history and modern history all the way to the HSC. I wouldn't say it's been completely defanged. For the HSC, we studied the Weimar Republic and it was pretty transparent as to how the Nazis rose to power - enabling by the conservatives and social democrats, Luxembourg getting murdered by the Freikorps in collaboration with the SPD (this was more of a footnote). It didn't do any of that national socialism == socialism stuff though, which was good. I would say that in high-ranking schools, the historical context is taught pretty thoroughly and it's drilled into us that it's the context and conditions that bring about historical events. I can't say how the history curriculum is taught in the majority of schools though.

      In terms of socialism being addressed, it was as you would expect, glossed over, mostly because it wasn't our unit of study. There was a unit of study relating to the Russian Revolution and the USSR til dissolution, but from what I've heard, it had a bias towards Trotsky? Not too sure about the rest of the unit though.