American children are taught that the Revolution was all about “freedom.” Is that true?
It depends on your definition of “freedom”. The limitations on movement into Indian areas west of the Appalachians, while perfectly reasonable from the British point of view, were undoubtedly viewed as being oppressive by a fair number of enterprising colonists, and disappeared after the end of the war. In addition, the Intolerable Acts were an unjustified measure of collective punishment of residents of Boston after the Tea Party, and the Navigation Acts were designed to benefit the mother country, not the colonists. Otherwise, the British had a light footprint in America. The intensity of government did not really change after 1783.
The point of the Revolution was not to reduce the size of government, but to recognize that America was a separate nation worthy of self-determination. If you view “freedom” solely in terms of degrees of individual freedom from state control, as CLs tend to do, the Revolution was probably counterproductive. If you view freedom as being synonymous with national autonomy, it is a different story; your teacher was right.