Why don't we study the history of the USSR in high schools?

is this true?

You disagree?

Most Americans have pretty much no understanding of European history. The humanities aren't stressed here at all.

Back when I was in middle school we got to learn about Trotsky, Molotov, Lenin, and Stalin. But then again I went to a pretty rich middle school

I generally avoid conspiracy theories, but there's some truth to this.

School curricula are determined directly by our bourgeois government. Teachers are prone to radicalism because they're both educated and poor, so there's every reason for legislators to be wary of socialism in schools.

>Trotsky
the guy who got killed by stalin

>Lenin
the guy from red alert

How do we fix this? Less STEM autism and more intense standards?

I'm 18 and my NYC high school taught Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, pogrom gulag Bolsheviks etc. Also covered Khrushchev, Gorbachev, etc. They never went into detail about the different branches of Communist ideology though.

I do agree with this desu, my school skimmed through it.

Even worse, there are living intellectuals who supported the US uncritically during the Cold War!

What other reasonable choices did they have instead?

Recognizing that both sides were awful?

And then what?

i dont see how you could study something like that since both communism and capitalism have never been tried lol

Synthesis

we fix it with MORE stem autism. because people with 8th grade reading levels can at least have standards faked to accomodate them. arithmetic cannot be faked

But you really only need a 5th grade understanding of math to be a functioning citizen. The same isn't true of history and political science.

>you really only need a 5th grade understanding of math to be a functioning citizen
where are you from my burguer?

I would disagree with your assessment of necessary math skills. I don't think it's possible to plan a retirement with any less than algebra, and that's a very basic sense of the word.

the problem with 'increasing" reading standards is that it's a politically loaded subject. common core has replaced shakespeare with the hunger games because it's "politically relevant" which of course, means vote for the democrats. they STILL complain that the curriculum is too demanding. my sister is in school right now, and the current environment ignores the needs of advanced learners to cater to utter retards.

so now because you wanted to tamper with standards, we end up with NO functioning citizens, instead of a few who taught themselves.

it's gotten so bad my parents are just sending my sister to school in china

Because we spent the first year of modern history on 6 GORILLION and the second year on MCCARTHY WAS A QUACK THERE WERE NO COMMUNISTS IN THE USA

>USSR failed

Still better than any shitty anarchist commune that never lasted more than a few years

I see it less as a conspiracy and more of an imperative of the ruling ideology. It is in the interest of the ruling class to censor the idea there are alternatives to capitalism.

Now I'm depressed

>teachers
>"""poor"""

They're prole as fuck

>USSR
>failed

It was merely a world power for 50 years

But it never reached its goal of communism

(((yes goyim, free market capitalism is the only viable way to organize society, now learn this basic arithmetic so you know how many tons of coal you hauled for your benevolent job creator at the end of your 13 hour shift)))

Because kids are dumb fucks who forget everything they learn. Also because it doesn't suit the government's agenda to teach children what the USSR was other than "evil communists who tried to beat America, but lost".

People interested in the Soviet Union should learn about it themselves. Not many other people knew about Soviet history. In high school, I made a Stalin joke and the girl I told it to didn't know who that was.

Although I try to think of this as a good thing, so that the government went brainwash people as much, when I heard high school students say that Karl Marx was Russian I wanted to hang myself. Also the USSR was socialist, not communist, but we learned it was communist anyway.

Soviet history is so interesting, but I guess Snapchat and Instagram are more entertaining for other people.

>
>lenin
that was stalin.

It started to fail once nationalism was allowed to rise in some soviet states likes Ukraine. And after the liberal reforms of to remove central planning, encourage profit motives, reintroduce credit etc.

>USSR
>non-capitalist

libcom.org/library/what-was-ussr-aufheben

I've been looking for something like this. Thanks.

it was very hard to learn about them when they were hiding all their shit

nowadays schools teach quite a bit of the USSR

>I'd guess 90% of Americans don't know who Trotsky or Lenin was
If my grade school education is representative, it's not from lack of being taught, it's just not reinforced. The curriculum grows more insular as the grades pass, culminating in a junior/senior's American History course.

>Of course, from its very inception the Soviet Union had been subjected to the lies and distortions put out by the bourgeois propaganda machine and it was easy for committed supporters of the Soviet Union, whether working class militants or intellectuals, to dismiss the reports of the purges and show trials under Stalin as further attempts to discredit both socialism and the USSR. Even if the reports were basically true, it seemed a small price to pay for the huge and dramatic social and economic transformation that was being brought about in Russia, which promised to benefit hundreds of millions of people and which provided a living example to the rest of the world of what could be achieved with the overthrow of capitalism. While the bourgeois press bleated about the freedom of speech of a few individuals, Stalin was freeing millions from a future of poverty and hunger.
>Of course not everyone on the left was taken in by the affability of 'Uncle Joe' Stalin. The purge and exile of most of the leaders of the original Bolshevik government, the zig-zags in foreign policy that culminated in the non-aggression pact with Hitler, the disastrous reversals in policy imposed on the various Communist Parties through the Third International, and the betrayal of the Spanish Revolution in 1937, all combined to cast doubts on Stalin and the USSR.
They've got to be joking.

And I would much rather people know the facts about what life in the USSR was like, how things were done. Who and what revolution made the system come into existence is largely irrelevant in my view.

>They've got to be joking.
There's nothing objectionable in what you quoted, user.

The destruction of the Spanish revolution alone makes it clear the USSR could not give a single fuck about all this communism/socialism/democracy/freedom-nonsense and that the idea human beings living free from the power of coercive institutions was at best a disastrous apocalypse for the Rulers and planners of the USSR.

That's fine, 90% of Russians don't know 99% of american presidents.

The fact of the matter is that the USSR's response to the Spanish Revolution did not serve to alert the whole of the international Left to the counterrevolutionary nature of the Moscow government, or even the majority of the Left. Outside the Latin countries where anarchism and Trotskyism enjoyed popularity, national Communist parties subordinate to the Comintern continued to be both the dominant force on the non-parliamentary Left and the chief beneficiaries of recruitment into Communist politics, and the weight of the party line on ordinary members was considerable. It was not till the Kremlin's brutal suppression of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 that the first major schism of opinion on the Soviet Union occurred.

Also:

>And I would much rather people know the facts about what life in the USSR was like, how things were done. Who and what revolution made the system come into existence is largely irrelevant in my view.
The one very much determines the other.

>Why don't we study the history of the USSR in high schools?

We do.

Grew up in NY, upstate, not NYC like you. Since you identified as 18 I don't know where you are at at an educational level; being still in high school or college. When you interact with people who grew up in other states you start to appreciate how good the NY education system compared to other states.

Note: I went to high school before the common core and all that standardization swept through the NY education system though.

...

Not in Florida

The closest we got was my Cuban-born English teacher using Animal Farm as an example of why only capitalism can succeed.