Question:
Answer:
Louis Irving, you didn't answer his question. You picked a fight with him. Oh yeah!? Well you're from Australia...There was discrimination there!
Yes, there was but that wasn't the question. And how old are you that you learned in school a nice picture of Imperial Britain or the antebellum South in the USA?
I went to school in the 80's and 90's, half of my teachers were black, and I knew who Rosa Parks was before I knew what the Bill of Rights was. Also learned why Columbus was evil incarnate, and the many, many sins of the Americans in the name of "Manifest Destiny." We screwed the blacks, the Indians, and then the Mexicans for good measure. American history was learned as a series of oppressions against people of color: African slaves, Native Americans, immigrants who came through Ellis Island, the working class during the Gilded Age, the people targeted as commies in the McCarthy Era, and the forced de-segregation of the South. (And I'm from the South)
I learned that in elementary and middle school. I got a degree in history at college and most professors leaned very heavily to the left, one of my professors was then the current head of the NAACP. Trust me, he was not a "pro-establishment" or "Good ol' days" conservative patriotic guy. Maybe you went to school in the fifties, or maybe you were homeschooled. LOL.
I'd be willing to be that in Australia, as well as the UK, that the curriculum (AT LEAST to some extent) frankly talks about past mistakes and injustices. Australia and the UK are more and more ethnically mixed, so their teacher is not necessarily a white conservative, and besides, Anglo-American culture revises as it goes along. 50 years ago, Columbus was a hero, then he was a genocidal war criminal, now he's considered more or less an *sshole. Perceptions change, the curriculum changes, and the cycle repeats itself.
About the question--they learn almost nothing of the War. Really how could they? They did medical experiments on Chinese civilians just like the Nazis did to the Jews. They tortured POW's, used chemical weapons, slave labor, prostitute slaves, and the whole "Rape of Nanking" thing.
They learn a very brief, very dry account of names and dates. When my Japanese wife was in elementary school 20 years ago, living in Hiroshima, they would go to school on the anniversary of the bombing and teach the kids about "the horrors of war," and have survivors give testimony to the kids. This was a very powerful thing, and the result is a lot of Pacifism in the Hiroshima area. They don't talk a lot about war crimes, just more that "Japan's war was a disaster for Japan and for Hiroshima it was an apocalypse. Don't let it happen again."
But in recent years, although kids still go to school on the bombing anniversary, they don't even talk about the war anymore. When I was working at an elementary school as a teacher, they had a ventriloquist come in do a show for the kids. Just entertainment. I guess with the generation that experienced the bomb out of the picture now, Elementary school teachers don't want to deal with it until the kids are more mature. Also schools (junior and high) will visit the a-bomb museum on school trips, and that is a haunting place to send a kid. (About the same as the holocaust museum)
(However there are no mentions of Japanese actions in the war that led up to the bombing.)
My Polish friend told me every schoolchild in Poland has to go to Auschwitz on a school trip. It's a hard thing to teach a kid, but at some point they have to learn.
