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.
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.
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.
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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.
no subject
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.