Almost anyone with a high school education can tell you that 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, yet I find barely anyone knows of the numbers of (for example) the Ukrainian Terror Famine or the Great Leap Forward. Why?
Hi there!
You’ve asked a question along the lines of ‘why didn’t I learn about X’. We’re happy to let this question stand, but there are a variety of reasons why you may find it hard to get a good answer to this question on /r/AskHistorians.
Firstly, school curricula and how they are taught can significantly vary between different countries and even between different states within a country. Additionally, how they are taught is often influenced by teachers having to compromise on how much time they can spend on any given topic. Secondly, we have noticed that these questions are often phrased to be about people's individual experience but what they are really about is why a certain event is more prominent in popular narratives of history than others.
Instead of asking "Why haven't I learned about event ...", consider asking "What importance do scholars assign to event ... in the context of such and such history?" - the latter question is often closer to what to what people actually want to know and is more likely to get a good answer from an expert. If you intend to ask the "What importance do scholars assign to event X" question instead, let us know and we'll remove this question.
Thank you!