I’ve never been in a history class that covered the Three Kingdoms War, the Qing conquest of the Ming Dynasty or the Taiping Rebellion in great detail, events that are respectively the third, fifth and sixth bloodiest conflicts ever in human history.

These oversights exemplify the Eurocentric nature of modern history curricula, which often highlights the significance of Western-sourced inventions and the occurrences on Western soil over contributions and events occurring elsewhere. Textbooks often tell the histories of non-Western regions in terms of how they were impacted by or how they affected the West.

Even in world or general history courses, modern Western events and achievements are granted a greater depth of study. I remember reading cogent first-person accounts from primary sources of Western history, while non-Western history seemed to be covered in broad strokes, with the lack of the same specificity in names and coverage of historically significant events within these territories.

The art history textbooks, for instance, indeed contain chapters concerning Western and Eastern art history. But the texts devote huge sections toward covering European art history in minute detail with a chapter per period, and then cover extra-Western art history in catch-all chapters that concern the art of a nation from 1200 to 2000. This deficit — whether purposeful or incidental — proved consistent as I flipped through textbook after textbook of assigned reading for multiple courses.

The Harker course catalog does offer a variety of history courses. Classes specific to European and American history or philosophy abound, however, while the catalog lacks classes specific to the history of nations outside of Europe and North America. Sixty percent of respondents to a Winged Post survey indicated a desire for a course that defied the Eurocentric norm.

On a superficial level, these choices of what to keep and what to discard from the curriculum might just be for the sake of cutting down a course to fit within a semester or a year.

But what the books include tells of value assignments that we Westerners have made, either subconsciously or consciously.

“Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it.” This adage emphasizes a huge reason why history continues to be studied throughout all levels of school.

But the history of the East differs from that of the West. Non-western cultures merit study of their histories beyond just how Westerners appeared and altered the natives’ lives.

Learning the history of other cultures is useful in making meaningful connections with people from those cultures. Understanding history is thus key to forging relationships, ones as personal as friendship or as significant as a country to country alliance. With a globalized, cosmopolitan world comes the need for an educated populace that looks past its own borders — and biases — in an attempt to make things better.

In short, this is not an issue local to Harker. It involves decisions made by organizations such as the CollegeBoard and its Advanced Placement curriculum. Already AP curricula, like the AP U.S. History curriculum, face revision to avoid whitewashing.

Perhaps a look at world history class curricula, as well as the possibility of non-Western-specific history classes available earlier on in high school may be in order.

This piece was originally published in the pages of the Winged Post on Jan. 27, 2016.

Elisabeth Siegel (12) is the Co-Editor-In-Chief of the Winged Post. This is her fourth year in Journalism, and she especially loves production nights and bonding with the rest of her staff. In previous years, she was Winged Post news editor, copy editor and reporter.