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Notes -
I definitely remember being taught about the Spanish American war, but I think most of my classmates, if asked today, would say something like ‘well, Cuba attacked Maine, so we had to go to war’ on the high end of historical knowledge. There’s only so much class time to go around, especially when a full 70% of it has to be dedicated to the civil war/slavery and WWII/the Holocaust.
This pattern of spending 70%+ class-time on the national lore and the rest of random tid-bits of history nobody quite remembered anyway was also present when I went through K12 education in Turkey. Every single detail of Ataturk's life and 1918-1923 history of Turkey drilled again and again in increasing detail for us instead of course. I wonder if there is any national curriculum anywhere with an alternative history that avoids this trap. But then what would you teach? History sounds very difficult to grapple with kids without some sort of narrative.
Not doubting the reason for the pattern. But ‘why American kids don’t know about the Spanish-American war’ is because they get a day long lecture about it, once. In contrast American kids know about D-day, Pearl Harbor, the battle of the bulge, guadalcanal and midway, Auschwitz. Because each one of those gets as much class time as the Spanish American war in its entirely- in some cases considerably more.
I can imagine a high-IQ Trump inflected curriculum in which the civil war is mostly brushed over, but the Spanish American war and WWI get a starring role in addition to WWII because it’s about America’s rise on the world stage.
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