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Douglas_Knight comments on On the Power of Intelligence and Rationality - Less Wrong
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Americans certainly are, implicitly by not mentioning the Eastern Front (except for the initial treaty and betrayal). In my experience, when people set out to talk about the whole of WWII, as opposed to some piece that comes up in conversation, they make a point of saying that it was about the Eastern Front.
Yes, well, anecdotally average Americans can't even find the Eastern Front on a map of the world... And they're also hung up on the Pacific theater. I really was wondering about Western European school indoctrination though. (Incidentally, does the EU mandate some sort of common requirements for grade school programs in members states?)
They don't explicitly claim that the east front doesn't matter, and probably mention at some point that it was significant. But most of the time is spent on the west front, because the biggest goal of the teaching of WWII is to make students able to discuss how "the West" reacted to the nazis.
There are standards, but they are mostly formalisms. As in, if two programs follow the standards, then you can compare them, but just knowing that they comply with the standards does not tell you anything about the content of the courses.
As an anecdotal probably not average Australian I don't recall hearing the term 'Eastern Front' discussed. I would probably be able to point out some of the places on a world map where significant fighting was concentrated and some of the key events occurred, particularly those most related to Australia. It may be the case that I simply haven't made note of the term 'Eastern Front' because that kind of detail bores me.
I object to the status implications you make (and to the factual assumption that school curriculum translates into knowledge of adults).
I was talking about anecdotal average Americans. That is to say, they may or may not be highly representative, but they're the one we hear anecdotes about. In other words, I didn't mean to impugn Americans as a group, and intended to refer only jokingly to the idea of classing all Americans as a single group with a meaningful (low variance) typical knowledge of history.
I do believe that a large majority of people everywhere never learn any more about most historical subjects than what they are taught in mandatory classes in school. And so they don't revise or correct the school curriculum's claims. If you disagree, can you give examples of historical claims made in school that average adults disbelieve? Particularly descriptions of historical events that happened outside their own country?
Not disbelieve, just don't remember, aren't aware of anymore, 10 or 30 years later.
Certainly, some things are forgotten, but I expect other things are remembered, particularly when people encounter direct questions about the subject. And those that are remembered, are typically there from school.
Egocentrism is a high status trait. Suggesting that Americans are able to get away with neglecting stories that don't focus particularly on their influence is to suggest they are able to claim high status. It also suggests that the speaker rejects the implied presumption of higher status over his own group. This would seem to be the default state of anyone who is not cowed into supplication by the status claimants.
Is the core factual claim accurate? That is, do average Americans have the kind of bias in historical education that Dan suggests? I don't particularly care either way but from my observational perspective if Dan's factoid was accurate then Dan could reasonably object to Vladmir's status implication. That implication being that Dan doesn't have the status required to state facts that make Vladmir's group look bad.
Hell yes. One example: I remember being shocked as a teenager when, going to school outside the US for the first time, I learned that it took the US 100 years longer to free their slaves than Britain. My US education had made it out to be such a big deal that they'd been freed at all, that they neglected to mention that little detail.
This still surprises me when I remember that I did not ever hear about other countries freeing their slaves in school.
Since I started this discussion, it's only fair that I point out that the history classes in public schools here in Israel are very bad, too. (As are all the other subjects...)
We didn't learn much world history that didn't fall under the umbrella of "history as it applied to Jews". We never even mentioned areas where there haven't been many Jews, like all of South and East Asia. We also didn't learn any regional (middle-east) history that wasn't about Israel itself. And we didn't learn any post-WW2 history outside Israel, presumably because all good Jews were supposed to have come to Israel then.
We did, though, predictably spend a lot of time on WW2.
Again, an anecdote. It is a piece of narrative representative to the idea that yes, US education is particularly self-embellishing (and thus evoking this connotation in the human mind, with availability and representativeness heuristics etc.), but it's insignificant evidence towards concluding that. Argument-as-soldier, dark arts.
The problem with the argument remains the same no matter whether the conclusion is correct, and whether the intention is to enlighten or to deceive.
"My group" here must be people with bad memory for things that don't interest them. Objection is not to "stating a fact", but to the way it's stated: it's in the "arguments as soldiers" class, missing the context and as a result giving connotations not following from the stated fact ("dark arts" feel). This discipline applies no matter what object-level connotation is created (of course emotions make some violations more salient to my mind than others).