Lessons not Learned

Last month was the 50th year since the JFK assassination.  One day that week while I still had the newspapers on my counter and one of the older gentlemen I work with was reading JFK articles  He looked at me and asked a simple question that embarrassed me.  "What did they teach you in school about this?"  I had to tell him that my school never made it to the JFK era of American History.  I was embarrassed to say that!  It is not my fault that the school systems I grew up did not offer modern American History.  I am sure that everything I learned about JFK (which sadly is not much), I learned from the History channel.  Even in college I did not take a history course that centered on this era of history. 

I can only hope that the curriculum for history has been changed in my old school system.  I now know way too much about the fight for independence but nothing that happened after WW2.   It was embarrassing to admit I did not know something and had not done my own research to understand something that is important to our American History.