tbf I think children's history education has significantly improved since the 90s and they're not being taught exactly the way I was
...well, in Massachusetts they probably aren't. I assume in Florida and Texas they're learning that Christopher Colombus was the greatest supergenius of all time and could read minds and levitate
update: some brief googling of variations on "Christopher Columbus lesson plan" suggests the teaching is still kinda all over the place, from "CC was a bastard, we celebrate Indigenous People's Day" to "teach the controversy" to this particularly ripe one that calls him "America's Founder" and encourages kids to venerate the statue of Christopher Columbus and has the nerve to call it a "primary source"
update2: oh my fucking GOD the Florida Christopher Columbus curriculum is literally PragerU. YouTube link that you may want to open in incognito, or not open ever. I'm honestly not even sure how well this works as propaganda because it feels so... mid-argument? in the way a lot of conservative stuff does. like it's not really teaching the story from the top, it's just throwing stuff like "oh yeah well do you think white people were the only enslavers around?" at invisible Twitter opponents.
also it is wrong about a lot of basic undisputed facts like how long the trip was. and gets in more digs at Muslims than you would think possible in a video about an almost completely unrelated subject. and for some reason refers to the ancient Greeks as "permitting lifestyles" he didn't approve of, which I get as a dogwhistle for "gay" but it's the weirdest fucking way to talk about ancient Greece where the sexuality situation was uhhh NOT "a minority of adult men like to have consensual relationships with each other and the rest of us tolerate them"
update3: the Texas Columbus curriculum is more "normal," like it's certainly not addressing the atrocities but it's more like the "yay exploring the world!" version I got in the 90s than like PragerU taking weird side shots at everything conservatives are mad about. actually it's kinda written like there wasn't anybody in the land he "discovered," all it says is that the Bahamas "had riches that Columbus could take back to Spain," like, I guess just lying on the ground
