It’s history abridged. Hard to cover 3000 years of civilization in depth across 6 contents from multiple perspectives. Someone has to choose what to cut

That's very true, yet what's often cut is the most recent, and also the history that paints the host in the least pleasant light. I had history classes for probably 10 years, and so much of it was ancient civilizations, and middle ages.

I always thought this was odd too. I started learning history in second or third grade, but we never got past the first world war until tenth or eleventh grade. even then, we devoted only a couple weeks to the entire 20th century. modern US history (ie, 1945 to present) was a senior elective, and there was no analogous course for world history. in a well-regarded private school, it was entirely possible to graduate without having the faintest idea of what has happened since world war II. to this day, I know more about what happened in cyrus's failed campaign against artaxerxes than I do about the vietnam war.

in a weird contrast, we spent tons of time on the civil war and slavery (and not just the sugar-coated version either). we learned about thomas jefferson and sally hemings, and we learned about andrew jackson and the trail of tears. so I don't think it was out of squeamishness that they declined to cover more recent history.

I suspect that anything in living memory of the people who approve the textbooks doesn’t look like “history” to them, and also runs the risk of being considered overly political— it can be hard to be objective about events you lived through, so any stance the curriculum writers take will be attacked by the parents and grandparents that were on the other side if the issues.

I think there's definitely some of that to it, similar to /r/askhistorians "twenty year" rule. older events/topics can still be very controversial though. I went to high school very close to the mason-dixon line. there were a lot of parents who believed the civil war was primarily about states' rights, and some were very upset at the school's coverage of the civil war and european colonialism/imperialism.

I get that schools (especially private schools) ultimately need to satisfy the parents, but it strikes me as a massive disservice that my peers and I were able to graduate high school without learning a single thing to contextualize the two defining current events of our childhood: 9/11 and the iraq war. the film charlie wilson's war was the best explanation I got until I was in college.

Envious. My memory of history class here in Australia was pretty much entirely about the history of Australia. We are not a very old country. And then half of that was about how we oppressed our native population.

I think it's actually worse that what's taught isn't even coherent.