@mietze said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
My youngest child came home with a pilgrims and Indians themes project in kindergarten this year school year in WA state. Which was horrifying to me on many levels.
Public school instruction in the US is extremely fractured, not only state by state but district by district and school by school. (My older kids' elementary school would have NEVER done that, and also at the time was the main site for a native american students and families group for the district, and those parents very generously shared resources with the teachers, students, and other families about PacNW history and current culture!!)
There is such a strange deviation in how we teach people on a state-by-state basis. I spent my pre-teen through high school period on Maui, wherein we did explicitly discuss American colonialism and the annexation's effects on the modern day. That said, we absolutely did not discuss anything in lengthy detail that solely affected the mainland. This made it surprisingly frank, like in US history the teacher said "The Civil War was about slavery," and that was that. When I was in early elementary school, I lived in Georgia in which the textbook used was like "here are the reasons why states' rights are important..." so you can imagine how much unlearning happened in middle & high school there.