Alright, I've been thinking. I'm from the US. When I went to grade school many years ago, we never really explored World War 1 in depth. It was kind of glossed over as a preamble to World War 2. We learned that Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated, and that this was the cause, but we never really learned about the reasons for the United States involvement in the war.
I think that is because you can't talk about the reasons that the United States was involved in the first world war without talking about the labor movement in the United States. This labor movement was brutally put down, and the normal narrative of dealing with the threat of the Soviets doesn't really justify it since there was no Soviet Union until after WW1.
I know that, since Texas is the largest buyer of school textbooks in the US, the Texas board of education is infamous for controlling the content textbooks for schools, and the board members are notoriously conservative in their approach to what information is approved. For example, most recently in the news there was a controversy over textbooks that referred to the slaved brought to the US as "workers" and did not distinguish indentured servants from slaves. I think that something similar may be happening in this case, since there is still a lot of the attitudes that have existed since the cold war towards labor movements have been generally suspicious and negative, especially from a conservative viewpoint.
What do you think of this idea? Is it possible that there is a concerted effort to avoid educating Americans about the labor movement in the twentieth century?
I graduated in 2003, all my History classes followed the same narrative, you start with the American Revolution, Civil War, Reconstruction, Industrial Revolution and the Labor Movement, WWI, Great Depression and WWII, and by then the year was over.
Sounds like your teacher just decided to focus on different subjects.
Define "many years ago." I was in grade school in the 80s, and we covered the labor movement in depth. 8th grade honors American history.
I graduated high school in 2008 and I learned about the labor movement, even without honors history or anything like that. This may be hard to believe, but not everyone went to the same school as you so it really doesn't make sense to apply your experience to the rest of the country. Also classroom time is limited and important subjects get cut all the time. There is no vast right-wing conspiracy to keep the masses ignorant.
I think this question is badly phrased for this sub, since it appears to be directly soliciting personal anecdotes, but: I graduated from high school in 2005. My public high school history class covered the US labor movement about as well as anything else (HS general history classes are pretty cursory by neceesity of shoehorning 200+ years of US History into 1 or 2 years), I definitely remember a chapter in the textbook about it, we had in-class discussions and a short research paper on it. However, I went to school in a relatively wealthy and liberal city.