Almost a quarter of respondents (23%) said they believed the Holocaust was a myth, or had been exaggerated, or they weren’t sure
I’m really, really hoping that “I’m not sure” makes up that 23% and simply represents people suddenly feeling insecure when polled and generally feeling shy about being committal when being questioned by a stranger. But this is America, so probably it’s much worse than that.
Yeah, I don’t remember learning much of any 20th century world history in school. Certainly not in high school. I don’t remember the Holocaust being covered at all. (Maybe there was something, less than I already knew and thus wasn’t memorable, but it was pathetically covered, if so.) Certainly I distinctly remember a number of times in school when it should have been talked about, but was completely ignored.
I don’t think that is anything new. I loved learning new stuff, and History class was basically story time for me.
But most people at my school - meh.
I suppose the only difference between then and now, is they now have way more BS available to them on the internet. Usually you had to find a weird book about aliens at the library or maybe a “spooky mysteries” show on TV. And even then it was about government conspiracies or ancient aliens - not holocaust deniers.
My son’s schools – both middle school and high school – had pretty good units on the Holocaust. However, nationally K-12 history education has been a victim of the Common Core.
And yet they still get so much wrong about American history and leave so many gaps. For instance, what happened between the Pilgrims landing and the American Revolution? Almost 150 years that no one ever mentions - filled with history, including a major war with Native Americans. The connection between the settlement of New England and the English Revolution is also something I only recently became aware of. American history is taught in small bites here - framed pretty much solely to glorify the country.
You may well be right about that, although it is difficult to find legitimate studies which aren’t funded by dedicated homeschool advocates who have a dog in the hunt, which tends to make the conclusions a bit suspect. I would agree that it is certainly possible to get a good education from home schooling. It’s also possible to get a completely biased and incomplete education from the same source. Some kids thrive in that environment, and some would do better to be socialized in a bigger learning situation surrounded by peers.
In the case of the example to which I was replying, Tara Westover did not receive a good home education, and her parents were both nuts and ultra religious. She was lucky to escape.
Thinking back on this, I’m probably a minority within a minority. My family, expecting the hostility, made it their mission to set us up (my generation) to get an education whether others treated us badly or not. It was hope for the best, but prepare for the worst. One of the main examples I can think of was the emphasis on reading. None of us learned to read in school. We’d already learned at home before we got there.
With so many ways to record and pass along knowledge from generations that are no longer with us, I hesitate to emphasize the need to rely on living people to remind us of the lessons they learned. I say this coming from people who were forced to pass down a lot of oral history. Shouldn’t having letters, books, audio/video recordings, etc. be enough? A lot of effort went into collecting it, and it seems like we need more effective ways to use it.
My experience was they did a bad job of that too. It was mostly about kings and queens. There was nothing about the Peasant’s Revolt, very little about the Levellers compared to what they taught about Oliver Cromwell. Nothing was said about how William the Conqueror didn’t conquer the English city where my school was. My school never taught me about the Windrush generation, or the Peterloo massacre.
I wonder how much of that is unique to the US, though? I mean, if you took a survey in Russia, I wonder what percentage of the same demographic could tell you what the Holodomor was or what Molotov-Ribbentrop was about? Or what percentage of British could explain the partition of India? There’s a million other examples, but I suspect that the US is likely not far outside the norm when it comes to that sort of thing.
Not for nothing, but a quarter of the population surveyed didn’t know that, either.
It’s a start. And NOT knowing the name of even one is a sign that something in their history education has gone wrong. Think of it as a canary in a coal mine.
I’m not saying we should rely on them, just pointing out a phenomenon I’ve noticed. It’s a difficult (and, from my point of view, disturbing) “last mile” problem and it seems that oral history projects – including well-funded and sophisticated ones like Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation or popular works like Studs Terkel’s – just don’t get humans all the way to that empathetic connection to the past that will help ensure that we as a society never forget and that the horrors perpetrated by fascist regimes never happen again.
Because “Auschwitz” is more than just the name of an extermination camp. For most people over age 40 it’s a well-known shorthand and symbol in popular culture for the horrors of the larger event. Talking about the Holocaust without being able to name Auschwitz is like talking about 9/11 without knowing what the World Trade Center was.
It’s a marker for understanding the details of what happened. If you just know “hitler bad”, you get people who fall for “the democrats are just like hitler” arguments. People have to know why it was bad and how it happened. So we can head that shit off when it rears its head again.
Which we’re doing a crap job of right now. Because people don’t understand the details of German history during the first half of the 20th century.
In my experience, your average native-born citizen in the U.S. is just less informed about American civics and history than is your average naturalised citizen. The latter has a clear motivation to learn and embrace these things, while the former has been ill-served by the public K-12 education system and has been taught to believe that what most makes an American is to be born in the U.S.
I lived outside of Grantham for a bit, and had my kids in school there. The very nature of its boredom made it easy for my kids. Isaac Newton Margaret Thatcher. The end.
Yes, this is what I’m talking about when I discuss living memory. No other country has ever made the effort to confront its brutal and horrific history like Germany has. Not just the legal code, but the school curricula, the museums, the monuments, the oral histories and documentaries.
And yet, despite all that, the moment that most Germans who lived through the fascist period die out we suddenly see AfD candidates winning a lot of seats in parliament and suddenly see cells of bloody neo-Nazis being turned up in the police and military.
I was going to say something witty or insightful but just can’t because a hundred generations of my ancestors are whispering “It is about to happen again.”
