But you did do the prayer to the flag and saluting it, right?
Yeah, the Pledge of Allegiance has been around since WW1 - I assume that's the "prayer to the flag" you're referring to.
I've seen it in films, it's super weird that you lot consider that normal. Even in Soviet schools, which were a fair bit more ideological than by the time I grew up, you weren't idolising the Soviet Union as a nation so much as you were idolising communism, the liberation of the worker, and the Soviet Union as a union of nations rather than just "Ura Russia!". But the US approach really doesn't strike me as ideological so much as just nationalistic.
Definitely nationalistic. Programmatic American nationalism was born in WW1. At that time, there were still massive populations of immigrants in the USA whose primary loyalties were to their countries of origin. For example, in 1915, my great-grandpa's home town had a German-language newspaper and was doing charity drives to send care packages to German soldiers to fight against the wicked, hated French. So when Wilson managed to hoodwink us into the war, they realized fighting a war in Europe meant doing away with regional national loyalties. We couldn't be sending boys to war if they still hated the French weren't excited to kill Germans. So they banned German-language papers, introduced the Pledge to schools, other stuff like that. German Christian churches (incl Anabaptist, Reformed and Lutheran) would even put the American flag up front in the sanctuary to prove they weren't traitors. Over a century later, it's still there, something I find inappropriate, but something you can't remove without causing a shitstorm.
So if you think about it, the origin of all that stuff is drumming into Germans' heads that if they want to live in America, they'd better be Americans, not Germans, and take America's side, not Germany's, in a war. And you know what, I can't say it's entirely wrong-headed. You can't have massive populations of disloyal immigrants in a country.
Did you ever celebrate more internationally influential liberal nations like France or England? Thinkers like Locke? The English Civil War? The French Revolution, Napoleon, and the Napeoleonic Wars? After all capitalism and liberal democracy as an ideology predates your nation's rise to prominence by centuries. Predates the discovery of the new world by Europe at all, really, since they arguably began with the Magna Carta (1215).
This is a good question and maybe one I haven't thought a ton about, but I can stab at an answer. From 1783-1917, America's disposition toward Europe was pretty unfriendly, the overall dominant attitude being that Europe was a bloodthirsty continent of warmongers who never met a field they didn't want to soak with the blood of teenage boys. In fact, when Hiram Stevens Maxim was showing American investors his machine gun idea, he was reportedly told, "Go sell it in Europe - they can't ever get enough of killing each other over there."
So, prior to WW1, we were isolationist, anti-monarchy, and anti-imperialist., so I think 19th C Europe just didn't get any attention in our curriculum. However, we were extremely busy with westward expansion, and the Spanish Empire was crumbling during this time. So I learned a lot about Lewis & Clark, the Gilded Age, the Civil War, the railroad, etc. We also paid a fair bit of attention to the rest of the Americas - I learned more about Simon Bolivar and Benito Juarez than Napoleon Bonaparte and Queen Victoria. Now, I did learn about the Magna Carta, Locke, Hume, Smith, etc...American history prior to 1776 is English history, so I got a fair bit of that. I remember my high school econ teacher liked Smith a lot.
So the short answer is there was a lot going on in the Americas, so after the Revolution, traditional American education mostly focuses on the Americas, occasionally taking a break to give very, very brief attention to Europe, but I didn't really learn about the Napoleonic Wars at all until recently.
