When I was in school we never did European History. In elementary school we explored the history of concepts like writing and numbers. I remember carefully marking a clay tablet in cuneiform. When I switched schools in 4th grade we started to do a lot of American History. 6th grade was Ancient Civilisations from the Mayans to the Ancient Chinese, Rome and Greece were covered, but I don’t remember anything about Western Europe. In 7th Grade we did world geography, that involved a bit more European History, because we had a unit on each continent. In 8th grade it was back to American History, which since I’m from Lexington Massachusetts tended to be very heavy on the revolutionary war and sort of gloss over the rest. In 9th grade I took World History, it was as Matthew Connelly puts it, civilisation du jour, not Eurocentric or ethnocentric, but once we got passed the development of agriculture there was no cohesive narrative. In 10th grade I took Advancement Placement World History. I loved that class. Towards the end it became more like global history or even the history of globalisation. We essentially only explored the late modern world in terms of relationships across vast distance. We learned about the Opium war, but nothing about English domestic politics during that time.
That class is also where I probably first learned the word Eurocentric. The class had obviously been developed as a response to earlier more Eurocentric curriculums. I had never experienced a truly Eurocentric curriculum, but that is when I came to realise that most of the adults around me had. My mom is a scientist, but I’ve been a history geek since age four, and she never minded hearing me yammer on about it. She was really surprised by a lot of the stuff I was learning in World History, especially about science done outside Europe. She actually became fairly frustrated with how Eurocentric the history curriculum she had in school was, because she felt that she had been deprive of relevant information.
In 11th grade I took yet more American History, East Asian Studies and Political Thought. Political Thought was my only truly Eurocentric class before uni, and many of the students actively complained that Confucius wasn’t given his due.
In my education prior to uni, Europe was effectively provincialised. This never seemed that abnormal to me. I didn’t go to school in Europe and about 40% of my classmates weren’t of European descent, so it made sense to me that the curriculum did not focus on Europe more than anywhere else. Some would probably criticise the education I had as an example of rampant political correctness, I wouldn’t. Although not having done European History has certainly proved inconvenient at St Andrews.
When I came here to St Andrews, my first history module was Scotland Britain and Empire (I had to reverse some classes because I also do psychology). That module was honestly a bit scary. I went into it very self confident, after all I had supposedly already done two years of university level history classes in High School. I was wrong to be that confident, it was a genuine struggle both to get my writing up to the appropriate level, and to go from a global perspective to a national and European one. Many of the Historians whose work we read this week discuss the struggles of turning away from European and national history, I would say that switching towards it is equally hard. I think this means that the European perspective should maybe not be viewed as more intuitive or natural.