Required reading for 4th graders in Illinois....

[kandrathe]

Honestly? I'm still sitting here, REALLY surprised that this is a story, and then I'm even more surprised that people didn't have to do biographies of presidents.

I can't remember much of what I was taught in High school social studies (76-79). I do remember some things... we did a project on environmentalism, where I designed earth sheltered housing, and read Silent Spring. We analyzed the economic stagnation of the Carter era. We learned about the American Revolution, and the Civil War. We studied WWI, WWII, Korea, and a little bit about Vietnam (as it was recent history then). We learned about US presidents en masse, which maybe had some additional focus on Lincoln, FDR, Wilson, Kennedy, Nixon.

From the sounds of it, you guys had shitty shitty social studies / history teachers.

Yup. Back then there wasn't really enough paper writing. More multiple choice, fill in the blank, short answer type questions, and too much memorization.

I did check out controversial books from the school library to see what the fuss was about them... Some controversial reads at that time I remember were; Catcher in the Rye, Brave New World, A Clockwork Orange, A Farewell to Arms, Flowers for Algernon, Go Ask Alice, Lord of the Flies, Mein Kampf, Of Mice and Men, Slaughterhouse Five, To Kill a Mockingbird, Ulysses, and others...