My second hot take of the day

[sabotabby]

Apparently 40% of Millennials don't know that 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust but I'd wager 90% of Boomers don't know that the death toll in the Holocaust was actually 12.5 million.

Comments

[lapinlunaire]

To be fair, I think it's horrible if it's not being taught about enough in schools

Though I'd like to know more about the survey demographics.

[sabotabby]

I would say that it probably is taught in schools. I mean, we had a whole paragraph about it in our history textbook in the WWII chapter! /sarcasm Though that's probably gotten better now.

With our kids, WWII is the only part of history they know anything about because of movies and video games. The problem tends to be that they have so much other stimuli that whatever they get taught only gets half-absorbed, and a bunch are also getting alternative facts from the intertubes. So they are unsure why the Nazis were bad.

If I teach a lesson or show a video, guaranteed I have 10-20% of their attention, and I like to think I'm a pretty good teacher and they're vaguely interested in the subject matter. In history, with an average teacher? They're unlikely to recall any facts past the final exam.

[lapinlunaire]

Wtf, really? It's weird that we got more than a paragraph about it and we were (technically) neutral during WWII. Then again, there's a lot of stuff that barely gets covered and is glossed over in our own textbooks.

I don't know if it's just the stimuli (people also said this of teenagers when I was a teenager) or if it's more that society as a whole -- school, parents, media, etc. -- just don't really convey enough of just how horrifying the Holocaust was and the way that things like "being a bit toooooo similar to Nazis" aren't 100% socially unacceptable.

[ebourland]

I'm always a little freaked out by the rapidity with which history is revised, or just forgotten. It is what happens when we stop telling these stories. =(

[sabotabby]

Yeah, now that the last Holocaust survivors are dying out, unless there's a political reason, it'll vanish. Weirdly, the victims of, say, the Cultural Revolution are more in people's heads now.

[franklanguage]

This is the first I've heard this statistic, and the news doesn't surprise me at all.

From the time I heard of the Holocaust—when I was 11 I saw Night and Fog—I never had any doubt it had happened, and I was born at the tail end of the Baby Boom.

[sabotabby]

I guess it's just that it's the one genocide people have heard of here, so I do find it a bit surprising, but not much because I work with young people and their perception of history is interesting to say the least.

[lapinlunaire]

I'd love to hear more about the perception of history Canadian Kids These Days have, if you don't mind talking more about it! Sorry if that's weird, how history is taught is just a minor weird obsession I have.

[sabotabby]

Caveat: I don’t teach history, I’m hearing what kids learn secondhand, and it’s been two decades since I’ve studied history in high school. Also I think there are genuinely great high school teachers, and even bureaucrats in charge of curriculum, who try to do things differently.

BUT. The focus is on Canadian settler history. Every attempt at inclusivity means that something else is taken out. So the history text will be white dudes and dates, focusing mainly on Prime Ministers and wars, and you’ll have a segment on The Role of Women or the Horrible Treatment of Chinese Immigrants or Oh Yeah There Were Indigenous People Here and We Were Shitty To Them. And every so often, someone points out that, say, the contributions of queer people aren’t acknowledged enough. So we need less women’s history, etc. Or worse, we have a Black History course so there’s no need for it in Default History.

There’s also set curriculum that happens in chronological order, students drag their feet, and so in my various post-Renaissance history classes, we never got past the 1960s, and it was usually a day or two on that. And then you have teachers who attempt to teach the entire Cold War though the Cuban Missile Crisis, to use an example of what a teacher actually proudly did at my school.

The result is that students come away with a patchwork knowledge that mainly focuses on WWI and WWII. (Canadian history has a huge focus on WWI because we’re very patriotic about being used as cannon fodder for the British Empire.) Students who find the focus on primarily white male achievements during wars not particularly interesting get turned off the subject. Students who do find this interesting will delve further and often find themselves in murky, Alt Reich waters. Similarly, I think the focus in American History on the Civil War leads kids who are into history to the glorification of the Confederates and anti-Black racism.

I was fortunate in that I was already interested in history, and I happened to have very excellent history teachers on different sides of the political spectrum. The right-wing teacher still taught mainly dates and wars, but at least he was much more narrative about it, and it being a more contemporary class, we got up to the 1970s and I got to focus on the FLQ, which was far more interesting to me than wars. And then I had a left-wing teacher who was much more interested in looking at, say, feminist perpsectives of Ancient History (I had no actual interest in Ancient History but I took the course because he had a Certain Repuation), and even more interested in class discussions that digressed into how the NDP betrayed the Waffle.

My history textbook had just under half a page on the Holocaust in the chapter on WWII, and of that, one sentence was devoted to victims other than Jews. But to give the right-wing history teacher credit, we covered it in class in a lot more depth, and we had field trips to a Holocaust museum and one where we met with survivors in small groups and listened to their stories.

I would say this is very much a minority experience; I went to a really good school. And also I was in an art program, so we covered perspectives on history that weren’t in the curriculum through that. But for most of my students, they’re bored, they tune out, and they get that there were two wars and Nazis had a big army. So they come away with a very depoliticized view of history, which is in itself a political framework.