Why are certain prominent and significant people written out of US History?

[SheilaT]

47. Basically, there is only so much time in the school day and the school year.

American history in particular is a rapidly moving target. My mother was born in 1916, so when she was in high school they only had to cover about 150 years of American history. My younger son graduated high school in 2005, so he needed to add on an additional 75 years, which is --wait, where's my calculator -- oh I'll do the math by hand. That's 50% more history to cover. Choices have to be made about what to teach, and the courses are only intended as a survey anyway.

The real crime is that history is generally taught so badly that kids lose all interest and think that what happened before they were born is completely irrelevant. Such a shame, because history really does matter.

I have basically zero knowledge of Smedley Butler, although I have heard the name at various times in the past, because that's not an era of history that particularly interests me. The Tudors, on the other hand, can't get enough of them. Unfortunately, the popularization of various TV shows and movies and novels about those people has given many a totally false view of them and how they behaved and why. Sigh.