Yeah it was a middle school thing in Finland too, at least in the 90’s.
I did an exchange year in the US in my 2nd high school year, and I was honestly a bit surprised at how… well, simple it all was. I was a senior in the US and I’d learned just about everything that wasn’t specific to the US or English (and even some of those…) they taught either in my 1st year in high school or in middle school.
In my experience as an American, I’ve learned the same thing in multiple years, we kind of just chose a point to stop at and did that for our entire god damn school year, never moving on. We could have talked about so much interesting history, but no, we need to talkabout WW2 and completely gloss over most other things for the 12th year in a row
For christs sakes I was learning FRACTIONS AND DECIMALS IN MY SENIOR YEAR
I will admit the reason my last two years were such a stark contrast to my previous years was because I went from honors down to basic because I went to a vocational high school, Diamond Oaks, and they only has the base classes
But still I never want to have another history class on WW2 again, I don’t mind learning the era but I’ve relearned the same thing over and over again
WW2 again, I don’t mind learning the era but I’ve relearned the same thing over and over again
When your history class is written by the same folks responsible for the History Channel circa ~2002-2010.
every year of high school I and the rest of my class ('08) had was the same curriculum repeatedly.
history: ww2 bulletpoints, same as last year. write a paper about how bad the nazis were but how complex the situation was, actually, so don’t be so judgemental.
lit: baseball?? books and writing exercises about baseball.
math: algebra 1 over and over. I once got sent to the office for a disciplinary discussion for asking if we’ll ever hit algebra 2.
PE: no, none whatsoever.
art: watch whatever movies, free form ungraded discussion aka nobody does shit.
science: watch vaguely sciencey documentaries and write a paper about an animal’s behavior and habits.
electives: none, a myth we heard whispers of amongst older friend siblings.
foreign language: Spanish 1, every year.
i left right before my senior year and started working. I’ve never been sure if that was the right call or not but my friends that graduated are borderline illiterate to this day and completely math averse for sure. so I don’t think another year of ww2 baseball algebra would have helped me much more.