Stratovania

Well, lately the problem with primary school history lessons is that schools are finding less and less time to actually teach them. In primary school, the focus is on reading, basic math, and basic social skills-- which teachers end up having to teach because parents suck. Social studies and science get relegated to a few periods a week, scraped in here and there. So they barely get to go into any detail. So what happens is holidays get taught, because they most directly affect the students' lives. The reason the only presidents most kids can name are George Washington and Abraham Lincoln is because they learned about Presidents' Day in school because that was the answer to the question Why do we have off school this random day in February? And then of course, any holiday with any religious history is going to be watered down for fear of offending someone, so those holidays' history is going to be simplistic as well... so it's really not much of anything. This is not the teachers' fault, I must add-- it is school districts and board policies and bad parents and all the other things that make it hard for teachers to actually do the jobs they were trained to do. Oh dear, here I go again... will shut up now.