You're absolutely right. My favorite illustration of this is history. A lot of Americans learn about things like the history of U.S. colonial rule in the Philippines and say, "OMG! If only they taught us things like this in high school, I would have been so fascinated and engaged! But my stodgy old teachers didn't want to teach us the controversial stuff that might have challenged our naive views about our country and our government."
But... they did, for precisely that reason. And you probably wrote down the right answers about U.S. colonial rule in the Philippines on quizzes and tests, but at age fifteen you weren't ready to care. "People a long time ago did stuff that my teacher thinks is sooooo interesting, blah blah blah." Those stodgy uptight teachers, the reason you thought they were so stodgy and conservative was because they tried to make you learn about U.S. colonial rule in the Philippines.
That's the way our minds work. We can overlook something right under our noses a thousand times if we aren't ready to see it, and then as soon as we're ready, it blows our minds.
There was very little discussion of US actions in the Philippines in my middle school / high school history courses. There was some coverage in 10th grade world history, but the 11th grade US history course pretty much skipped it.
I can remember as a 15–16 year old high school student having a discussion about this with the teacher and other students, because we (the students) thought it was a serious oversight which left a whitewashed impression of the history of US international relations.
In general, the US and its military are consistently treated as “good guys” in American high school history courses, even when discussing events where that summary is insupportable by dispassionate analysis.
I can believe that it was different in other places. In fact, it's probably different at my old school now that conservative parents have been taught to be vigilant and constantly enraged about what their children are learning. Still, I think it's noteworthy that my old classmates remember our teachers as being uniformly conservative and narrow-minded when in fact we were reading bell hooks and examining John Donne's religious poems for sexual imagery, and that they have conspiratorial notions of teachers hiding information from us that they in fact tried very hard to teach us. (Tuskegee airmen, boarding schools for Native Americans, etc.) Science, too, I remember every single science teacher drilling into us that all scientific theories are incomplete, provisional, often based on limited data, and likely to be improved or even disproved in the future, and the students who sat in those classes with me remember us being brainwashed to think scientists are omniscient and infallible.
But... they did, for precisely that reason. And you probably wrote down the right answers about U.S. colonial rule in the Philippines on quizzes and tests, but at age fifteen you weren't ready to care. "People a long time ago did stuff that my teacher thinks is sooooo interesting, blah blah blah." Those stodgy uptight teachers, the reason you thought they were so stodgy and conservative was because they tried to make you learn about U.S. colonial rule in the Philippines.
That's the way our minds work. We can overlook something right under our noses a thousand times if we aren't ready to see it, and then as soon as we're ready, it blows our minds.