Most of them know fuck all about the systems of colonization, the different types, the different ways decolonization occurred (or didn't occur) and the legacies left behind. I will say it again, at least in the U.S. I cannot stand the way that history is taught. People learn nothing. It took me a while to realize that I learned a lot of "facts" but mostly a lot of nothing too. It's also hard to understand history unless you have real, modern world experiences to compare to.

One of the problems is that we often only get one or very few models/example for anything, and when you only have one model, you get a very narrow concept of what that thing is and how it came about and, therefore, you fail to gain the ability to think about how something similar could come about in the future, and what that thing would look like in modern times under different circumstances. Basically, it makes it hard to engage in critical thinking and self-reflection and wade through this post-Truth society we find ourselves collectively in.

I don't mean to make this controversial and invite racist, anti-Semitic, or whatever else comments. This is merely a critique from the perspective of historiography (the study of the writing of history, but also the teaching of history), but I will invoke some examples of things that are covered in school to some extent but leave something to be desired in maximizing what we learn from them: colonization, decolonization, nationalism, witch hunts, the Holocaust (We talk about it a lot in school but most people learn nothing. There are important lessons about the treatment of Jewish people specifically but the lessons are far more wide-reaching too and are relevant for groups that weren't even on our minds at that time, other genocides (including what characteristics something needs to be considered a genocide), Nazi party membership, free press, freedom of religion, different forms and examples of slavery (slavery has occurred around the world of people through various backgrounds through all of time including the present such as sex slavery, but in America we never want to use the word "slavery" to describe these other situations and I think that diminishes the gravity of these other situations and causes people to think that slavery is a vestige of the 1800s. As one example, my grandparents were trafficked across Europe as teenagers into years of "forced labor."), various political ideologies including marxism, socialism, and communism (does any American know what any of these things actually are), religion (including cults and other forms of non-deity-centered ideologies that produce religious adherents), etc.

Sorry, this is my stream of consciousness, but so much of the way history is taught is like: This is what happened. Then this other thing happened as a result. And this is how people felt about it. I'd like there to be more framing about how to think critically about what we're hearing. What questions to ask ourselves. What sources we have for our claims to certain knowledge. Identification of the players and their varying interests. Evaluation of sources and identification of biases. Historical blind spots. You get it.