Ok, I spent my formative years in the New York metropolitan area, namely Queens and Paterson. Our classrooms were always ridiculously diverse.
(Like— Eid al-Fitr was one of our no-school holidays.)
One of the things I remember as part of our curriculum in junior high was learning about the Hindu caste system, the Vedas, the Upanishads, etc., etc.
My question is— is that something that’s taught in all American classrooms? Or did I get lucky growing up in NYC?
I went to school in the mid-south — North Carolina. My experience is that you were lucky. We weren’t even offered the opportunity to learn about much foreign culture. There was history, world etc, but that was about it; there wasn’t a huge variety of courses offered that would have allowed learning about Muslims, Jews, Hindis, or other such cultures.
Our school holidays were either national holidays or Christian ones, never anything else. If non-Christians even went to my school, at the time I didn’t even know, and it was a pretty big deal among my little circle when I decided to acknowledge my paganism in public.
I would say your experience has a lot to do with growing up in one of the most culturally diverse and cosmopolitan cities in the US.