This questions is a bit of a doozy and I do apologize. However I've seen "The Troubles" brought up in different threads from time to time and as an American I never understood what was involved. I recently decided to look up the Wikipedia article about it and was shocked to see how in depth and LONG the article was. In American education we've never been taught anything about it and I'm confused as it seems to me it must have been an awfully terrifying and drawn out time.
Is there context that can be given about it to give Americans a better understanding?
I'll build a little on the previous answer, but mainly it's going to deal with "how history is taught in the United States."
First, it's important to note that there is no such thing as "American education", as in there is no one national system with national standards, but rather 50 state systems with state standards (plus DC and I assume Puerto Rico and the other insular territories). Texas has an outsized role in the rest of the US education system because it's such a large textbook market and textbook publishers will try to be as compliant as possible with their (ever changing and highly politicized) needs, but really each state establishes its own history curriculum requirements.
I'm going to take Massachusetts, just because I've been on the receiving end and the delivering end of educational requirements, so I'm most familiar with it. If you're interested in checking out what the History and Social Science Curriculum framework is for Massachusetts, you can access it here. For the purposes of this discussion I'll just focus on the high school level parts of the curriculum.
In high school, there are two large areas of history requirements, US History and World History, and each are broken into I and II modules. Please note that in the framework just the description of them alone covers some 40 pages, and are also building on skills and knowledge from previous grades' curricula that the average high school student may not actually have (maybe they are recent immigrants to the US, or moved from a state with different standards, or transferred from a school that didn't meet state standards, or just had a bad time of it in earlier grades).
There are also electives for US government, economics, financial literacy and news/media literacy - electives meaning that these are not required classes, and depending on the high school, these classes may not even be offered. The same applies for AP (Advanced Placement) classes, such as AP World History or AP European History. These are maybe the closest thing to a "national" standard since the classes ultimately teach towards the Advanced Placement test in their respective subjects (the tests are provided by the College Board).
Anyway, just to take World History, since that applies to this question: there are content standards (what the students should learn in the course) and skills standards, meaning that in addition to knowing specific things about specific times and places, the students are supposed to also develop certain analytical skills, skills understanding primary and secondary sources, etc.
The Massachusetts framework actually has a spot for the Northern Ireland conflict! It's in World History II, under "The politics of difference among people: conflicts, genocide, and terrorism", which leads to Standard 49:
- Distinguish between the concepts of genocide and mass atrocity and analyze the causes of genocide and mass atrocities in the modern world (e.g., conflicts over political power, historical grievances, manipulation of ideas about difference and fear by political forces).
Students can then use the Northern Ireland conflict (or one of nine other conflicts, including Darfur, Rwanda, Kashmir, Guatemala, Syria, and even the Rohingya in Myanmar - they've really kept the standards current). The point being that high school students meeting the state World History requirements are not expected to know each of these conflicts through and through, but to know enough of one of these conflicts (presumably using their analytical skills to be developed during the course) to be able to adequately address the standards requirement.
Another good reason to focus on Massachusetts is because the state has played an outsized-role in the Northern Ireland conflict, with its large and prominent Irish-American community that in many cases provided material support to the republicans, down to painting pro-IRA murals in South Boston. So this is less of an abstract topic in Massachusetts than it would be in other states.
But even with that as the case, there is simply is so much other subjects and skill areas to cover in World History alone that I am not surprised that the Northern Ireland Conflict at best gets put on a list for possible student self study for state education requirements.
One reason for this is that, for a lot of the last 30-40 years (AKA "when we were in school"), the Troubles weren't "history" for the purposes of the American educational system. They were current events.
I was in school in the 80s and 90s, and I did learn about conflict in Northern Ireland in school. Just not in history class. I learned about it the same way I learned about the Berlin Wall, President Clinton being elected, Itzhak Rabin's assassination, the end of Apartheid, etc. Interestingly, I never heard the term The Troubles used to describe the violence in Northern Ireland as a kid. As an American, I would consider that more of a British or Irish turn of phrase. Or maybe something used more in the US now that it's over, and we need to refer to it as a specific global conflict as opposed to "the news from Belfast"?
This might be more of a question about Social Studies curricula in American schools, and how things end up transitioning from "current events" or "cultural studies" to history as time passes and major global events pass from "now" to "then".
As to why the US might not be focusing on the Troubles in current day history classes (now that it is history), I think it might still fall into that "living memory" era where the proper historical context hasn't been established, and most people writing and teaching history textbooks don't quite think of it as "history" yet, even though it's been over for almost 20 years. Sort of the same reason I didn't learn about the Vietnam War in my childhood history classes, even though it was ~20 years in the past at the time. It's much easier to agree how to talk about things like the American Revolution than it is to figure out how to talk about something your teacher might have experienced firsthand. This is a well-known flaw of the American public education system, and not one that has a perfect solution.