A few weeks ago, I was helping mythical gf clean out her classroom, and I couldn’t help but take a little bit of time to look through some of the textbooks that her students used.  Obviously, it’s been nearly 20 years since the last time that I had a county-issue textbook to learn from, so I was curious to see just what kind of stuff children are inundated with these days, since the world has for lack of a better term, changed somewhat over the last 20 years.

Now, not a tremendous amount of things were at all that different, since math is math, and the rules of math aren’t ever going to change.  However, including the math, the social studies textbook were giant explosions of color and photographic content, that I certainly don’t remember being the case when I was in contemporary education. The text is gigantic, the photos are bold, colorful and honestly visually captivating, as I am sure there are educational experts who do this by design in order for the eyes of young children to absorb them as much as possible.

Naturally, as an adult looking at elementary school-level content, it’s a little surprising to see how rudimentary the subject matter is, but then again I’m 20 years past this point in my education and should know this stuff and thankfully I do.  But I think things are meant to be way easier for the kids of today than they were back when I was a kid, with pretty much all key information and subject matter being pre-bolded, pre-highlighted and basically be given to students on a silver platter for testing purposes, without the kids necessarily having to study that much.

However, the point of this whole post really stems from the thought that despite the fact that mythical gf’s class didn’t have any U.S. history textbooks, it really got me thinking about how I’d be very curious to see one today, to see just how educators spin some of the more historic things that have happened over the last 20-30 years, as well as how they describe and try to educate of events that I remember learning about, like all the wars of American history.

This is of course, leading to the inevitable mentioning of the rise and regime of our current president, whom it doesn’t require a lot of imagination to see just how divided the nation is as a result of their ascent.  But I’ll admit that I think I’d be fascinated to see just how the educational field treats all of it from the standpoint of teaching children of what was happening in the United States during this time.

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