Most of the electorate is CLUELESS about WWII history..

[SoCalDem]

Bush's Nazi remarks offer a PERFECT opportunity to tell us what really happened in WWII.

I am 59 years old, and in high school ( the highest education MOST people get) we never even "got to" WWII. Our public school system spends YEARS "schooling" us in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War and WWI, but by the time high school arrives in most of our lives, history is usually a mish-mash of memorizing dates, and little more.. My youngest son graduated in 1997, and what HE learned about WWII, he PAID for in college..The most interesting parts of WWII history, he learned in Italy..(he went to college for a while in Florence)..

With a generation as large as the Boomers, are I am guessing that MOST of us had similar experiences in school. I went to a good school, and yet our textbooks were out of date. With all the funds-cutting since, I cannot help but think schools today are much the same.

We, as a country have always just blundered forward, without much reflection on what came before. Our foreign policy has always been RE-active, instead of pro-active.

Since "feckless-leader" brought up Nazis, appeasement and WWII, maybe NOW is the perfect time to finally catch us up on our own history.

My guess is that most people's knowledge of WWII and the Cold War is what they have pieced together from movies.

I feel personbally lucky, since my junior year history teacher deviated from the "book" and gave us a primer on Viet Nam (he was actually suspended for a week for doing it too).. His brother was IN Viet Nam, and he thought that since so many kids in his class would be drafted, they at least needed to know what was going on. We learned about the French involvement and the history of why we were there..and that pissed off the Kansas Board of Education..bigtime..

How much did YOU learn about WWII in SCHOOL? where did you learn what you know about it?

Where we are NOW, is directly related to where we have been, and the steps we took to get where we are.. The Middle East is a DIRECT result of WWII. We cannot "solve" anything, until we KNOW how we got where we are, who was responsible for what decisions, and how they relate to us TODAY..

We are fighting against people who remember collectively, events that are thousands of years old, and who hold powerful grudges...and we re-invent ourselves every 4 years.. That does not bode well for us..

[Cooley Hurd]

1. My dad was in WW2 (ETO), so I learned about it because of that...

...but HS didn't address it to the extent that I learned about the conflict outside of school.

[BrklynLib at work]

2. Sadly, most of the public is clueless about anything that is not on reality TV.

x(

Have you ever watched Jay Leno do his Jay-walking shtick? Not only are these people ignorant, they are PROUD of it.

[NewJeffCT]

21. You can do similar in any country in the world

and find stupid, ignorant people and ask them questions that make them look foolish.

I'm not saying our education system is great by any means, but you could have the equivalent of Leno or Howard Stern (who I think has been doing similar for longer) in Russia, India, Japan, France, China, England, Germany, etc and you can find ignorant & stupid people.

[BrklynLib at work]

41. Questions that make them look stupid? Like "Who is the Secretary of State"..

"How many judges on the Supreme Court?" "What is the name of the Vice President of the United States?"
These questions do not make them LOOK foolish. It underscores their willful ignorance, and their lack of remorse over it.
That is what makes the routine so funny...the questions are NOT complicated, or about things that they would be unaware of if they cared at all about the world around them. THESE are the same people who thought chimpy would make a great president because they figured he would be a great guy to go have a beer with...

"Are you smarter than a Fifth Grader????" Most of the people on that show are not. Horrifyingly, too many Americans are not.

[RaleighNCDUer]

42. Yeah, but in THIS country we pay them big bucks to spout nonsense

in the media.

"Exactly what did Chamberlain do?"

"Uh, he was an APPEASER!"

"But what did he DO?"

"He appeased!"

:crazy:

[SoCalDem]

50. Give the guy a break, won't you?

The dog ate his homework :)

[Parche]

3. WWII

I know mostly Pacific, some Europe
But my specialty is 1941-1945 Pacific

Ask me anything....:woohoo: :woohoo:

:hi:

[SoCalDem]

5. I'm betting that you learned it on your own, though..

and because it's something at interested you, you spent a lot of time learning it. MOST people are not all that interested and probably only pick up a snippet here and there..and we all know how dangerous a "little knowledge" can be :(

[Parche]

20. Yes

All of it for over 30years now, since we really didnt have a history class that i would have liked...:hi:

[kwassa]

4. Most of the electorate is CLUELESS about history, any history ..

because most of the electorate doesn't read, or doesn't read much. Now, most get their information, such as it is, from television.

They have forgotten what little they learned in school, and they don't care much about history, because it is not about now.

[stillcool]

7. I am still clueless..

and I read...a lot! Unfortunately what I read doesn't begin to make a dent into the crap I've been force fed since kindergarten. There are too many tales of the same event, and logic and reason often fail to reward me with truth. If it were not for the Internet, I would not know which books to read. Hell, I wouldn't even know they existed. I am one of those Americans who believes that somehow the world started in 1776. I despise when Americans talk about other Americans as 'they'. It is 'we', and if 'we' can not educate each other what good are 'we'?

[bdamomma]

9. and those who do not know history are bound to repeat it.

[PDJane]

6. I'm the same age that you are.

I learned that history after I left high school, because I began to discover mytextbooks were wrong most of the time. I grew up in Canada, and most of the history I learned was early explorers, the British Isles, and the history of major battles in my own country.

I graduated from high school before the war in vietnam was taught, although I did learn about the French involvement there and the British involvement in the middle East; the Balfour declaration, for instance, was covered thoroughly.

I don't think history is covered as well as it should be here, either.

[bdamomma]

8. those who do not know should invest some time and watch

the PBS special The War.

[SoCalDem]

14. We saw it, but the soldiers stories are NOT enough

We need to see the "sausage" as it was being made. Wars always end up being about the soldiers and their valor. MOST soldiers do what's expected of them, and tell their stories (some of them) when they return. What we need to KNOW about are the events that SENT them to war, and how it could have been prevented.

Post-mortems still end up with the subject being dead. One thing a post-mortem CAN do, is to prevent MORE post-mortems in the future.

Fat-cats in suits, make bad decisions that end up destroying countries, emptying treasuries and getting millions of people killed, and we just dust ourselves off, have some parades, and blunder on to the NEXT fiasco.

We need some schooling..

[Goodnevil]

10. First off

Americans have somehow deluded themselves into believing that history doesn't matter. I blame that Nazi Henry Ford:

"History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's dam is the history we made today."

One of the most asshatted comments ever made by anyone.

Well, senor dick, Ford Motors is pretty much history.

Sorry, that was my Henry Ford rant. Anyhoozles, I think that if we actually create a culture in this country of respecting the lessons of history, we'll all be a lot better off.

[underpants]

11. Yeah but Hawkeye had some clever comebacks

I seant it on the TV

[BrklynLib at work]

44. heh heh heh...Korean War. I wonder how many of today's "citizens" would even know the difference.

[OwnedByFerrets]

12. I certainly know more about Neville Chamberlain

than I did when the week began. I think the most interesting thing is what Churchhill said of him at his eulogy.

"It fell to Neville Chamberlain in one of the supreme crises of the world to be contradicted by events, to be disappointed in his hopes, and to be deceived and cheated by a wicked man. But what were these hopes in which he was disappointed? What were these wishes in which he was frustrated? What was that faith that was abused? They were surely among the most noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart-the love of peace, the toil for peace, the strife for peace, the pursuit of peace, even at great peril, and certainly to the utter disdain of popularity or clamour. Whatever else history may or may not say about these terrible, tremendous years, we can be sure that Neville Chamberlain acted with perfect sincerity according to his lights and strove to the utmost of his capacity and authority, which were powerful, to save the world from the awful, devastating struggle in which we are now engaged. This alone will stand him in good stead as far as what is called the verdict of history is concerned."

This speaks for itself.

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

13. My history textbooks in junior high and high school in the 1960s were pathetic

It was understood that you had to go beyond them and my teachers invariably assigned extra work requiring consulation with encyclopedias or libary books. But I remember seeing several documentaries on World War II shown in my junior high in the auditorium. And television back in the 1960s had a lot of good documentaries on World War II. With only 3 networks back then, you either watched them or didn't watch TV. One of the great ones was The Valiant Years about Winston Churchill and his times, narrated by Richard Burton. But there were several other good documentary series as well with real war footage.

[SoCalDem]

16. My teacher who got suspended showed us film footage of the siege of Leningrad

complete with hangings.. and of course he showed us the super-8 films his brother sent him from Viet Nam. He personally was responsible for saving some lives of my classmates.. he got a few boys VERY interested in college, when they had previously thought they would just "join-up" before they got drafted.

after he got suspended, he held "classes" at his house for anyone interested. There were usually 7 or 8 kids every weekend, hanging out at his house..and NO he was not "oone of those weirdo teachers".. His wife was just as anti-war as he was, and she was really cool :)

[asjr]

29. Suspended because he showed a film?

That is terrible. I lived through WW2 so I do know quite a bit about it, but when I entered high school in 1946 of course they were using older textbooks and there was literally nothing taught about it. I was taught Home Economics (yes, back then girls had to take it) by the daughter of missionaries to China. She and her sister were interned in China throughout the war. The woman never smiled and I can guess why. Living in those conditions must have been horrible.

[SoCalDem]

34. Kansas has always had a "problem" with rebels

:)

The official charge against him was "deviating from the approved syllabus"..

[Ishoutandscream2]

32. God bless that teacher. He certainly did save lives

Those boys not interested in college would probably have gone over, and never come back. Your teacher was a real hero.

[SoCalDem]

38. He was a character.. He drove a bright yellow Charger '67

and would often race some of the guy students..

he was only a year or two out of college and LOVED history.

[livetohike]

15. I learned nothing in HS about WWII either

I'm 55 and I know our history book included WWII but we never got to it in class before the school year ended. My Dad was a WWII vet, so I learned some of the history from him and watching TV.

In college, I had an Amer. History course and a Western Civ. History course, but I can't remember what if anything, I learned about WWII there.

I'm out of touch with what might be taught in today's high schools, but I have a feeling they are teaching to the test instead of anything important.

[Wilber_Stool]

17. It's not what they don't know that bothers me,

it's what they do know that just ain't so. Most Americans learn history from the movies and tv shows. Just ask that average American about the Russian contribution to WWII and they'll look at you with a blank stare. Never heard of the Great Patriotic War. The Eastern front. Just ask someone how is it that a country so decimated by WWI was able to build an army that could threaten the world. You'll get no answer.

[SoCalDem]

22. and their knowledge of the Cold War is probably limited to James Bond movies

:(

[LiberalAndProud]

18. Good question.

I find that I don't even know where I heard Neville Chamberlain's "Peace in our time" speech, but I know I have heard it. I'm guessing that I must have heard it on PBS. I've done a fair amount of reading on my own, but I remember hearing (snippets? - all?) of Neville's speach ... maybe it was in WWII movies. I don't know.

But you're right, we're not going to get the info before college, if then, unless we seek it out ourselves.

[SoCalDem]

19. and even in college, unless you are a history major, you are unlikely to learn much

since college costs so much, and people have to work long hours to afford it these days. When I went to college, the idea was to get a LIBERAL education..learn LOTS of stuff..these days, you have to specialize so much to be able to even afford it, unless you are a history major, most will not "waste' the money just to larn interesting things..

[LiberalAndProud]

27. Very true.

A Liberal Arts education is not valued as highly as an MBA in the marketplace. And how much do historians earn per annum?

[Goodnevil]

47. Got my B.A. in History

and I'm having to go back for a B.S. in Environmental Health Science

I'll still write the great history text one day though :)

[Virginia Dare]

23. Take out WWII and you've got it exactly right..

all Americans know is the fluffy propaganda they're fed in high school.

It doesn't come close to the truth. It doesn't come close to substantive scholarship.

If you want to learn about history, you've got to take the initiative and seek the information on your own. How many Americans are that motivated?

[SoCalDem]

28. Not many...and that's why we get such stupid leaders & policies

people are uninformed & gullible.. :grr:and the ones who dare to speak up and educate, are criticized as "eggheads & smarty-pants"..

These same people probably would WANT a smarty pants doctor or car mechanic, though :shrug:

[Javaman]

24. From the sound of the other posts, it sounds like I was lucky...

I had 3 very very very good teachers on the subject of WWII. Not only did the cover the material very well, but they were vets themselves and would give us all sorts of anecdotal stories.

Also, my third grade teacher was a navigator on a B-17. All I had to do was ask and he would tell me all about the war.

On top of that, many of the teachers at my high school were vets (the women as well).

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

25. I was lucky

because my high school history included not only WWII, but Korea and even Viet Nam, which was really heating up when I graduated in 1968. I also watched "The Twentieth Century", a history program that was on CBS on Sunday nights when I was a kid. Most of it was about WWII. By the time I was in 6th grade I had studied the rise of Hitler and knew all about the Holocaust, thanks to that program and my trusty encyclopedia, which I would read to find out more.

[SoCalDem]

31. aaah, I remember that program.. back when TV was supposed to teach us and elevate us.

We always watched that program and "White paper" shows too..

Young people today, missed out on the good stuff tv used to show us..

[raouldukelives]

26. Mostly John Wayne movies

With the occasional outdated textbook.

[NewJeffCT]

30. I'm 41 years old - we always ended our history around Vietnam

My history classes always ended some time around the Vietnam War. It was always something we rushed to get through at the very end of the year.

The two history teachers in high school were both good and I learned a lot from them. Even though I majored in business, I ended up taking extra history classes as electives because I was very interested in history.

[Ishoutandscream2]

35. Yes, I'm 46, and we ended right where Nam was about to begin

In 1978, the 60's were very recent history. We never really delved into it. Oh, and I was the American History award winner for my high school that year. Thought I would like to brag a little, LOL!

[NewJeffCT]

37. good for you

The guy that won the award in my high school said it was a joke that I didn't win it.

[DU GrovelBot]

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[bullwinkle428]

36. "The World at War" TV series actually gave me a great deal more

information than I ever learned in high school on the subject of WWII!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_at_War

I recall watching the series sometime during my middle school years (age 11-14), back in the late 1970s when it was broadcast on PBS-TV.

[RamboLiberal]

56. I think it was one of the networks that broadcast it

ABC I believe. I remember watching it. I didn't see your thread and posted info below this on the series. I ordered the DVDs today. Really looking forward to watching it again.

[LanternWaste]

39. couldn't for the life of me tell you what the atomic weight

"How much did YOU learn about WWII in SCHOOL? where did you learn what you know about it?"


Well, although I do consider myself a faux-amatuer on WWII, I couldn't for the life of me tell you what the atomic weight of any of the halogens or noble gasses are, despite having had it drilled into my head for two semesters of chemistry.

Nor could I tell you what the equation is to find the area of a parallelogram. And despite twelve full years of music training, the Circle of Fifths is nothing more than a distant memory to me.

But I certainly don't feel myself to be stupid or ignorant.

Different people have different interests.

I'm sure a chemical engineer would sneer at our stupidity because we didn't know the atomic weight of lead. Would he be justified in doing so? That weight seems to be part and parcel of the foundation of knowledge, so who's to say?

And, like history, the sciences and the arts are directly pertinent and relevant to who we are, where we are and why we are there.

[SoCalDem]

40. True, BUT, I do EXPECT people who lead the country or want to lead it

to pay attention to history, and to explain to us WHY their policies are relevant and helpful to us and the world. That;s what we have NOT been getting for MANY years...

[LanternWaste]

45. But your post was referring to the electorate.

But your OP was referring to the electorate rather the leadership. That's how I took it anyways, but then again, I'm not very educated...

[DangerDave921]

43. i thought you were going to teach us something about WWII

[trof]

46. I'm 67. No WW II history in school.

Maybe there was an elective in college, but I don't remember one.

I've read a lot about it in my 60s.
WW I was when 'we' (western 'civilization') first started carving up the middle east and running things, or trying to.

British navy was changing from coal to oil and they had no oil.

Mesopotamia was where the first aerial bombing of a civilian populace took place. RAF, around 1919.

[edhopper]

48. Over?

Over? Did you say "over"? Nothing is over until we decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!

And it ain't over now. 'Cause when the goin' gets tough...

[RB TexLa]

49. clueless and don't care to know, they just want to know "what's on da Tee Vee tonite?"

[Beregond2]

51. I don't think

we got to WW2 either. But history was so badly taught, I wouldn't have known if we had. I had a teacher who lectured from the same notes she had been using since her student teaching days 40 years before. She just stood there until we were silent, then she started droning. If anyone spoke, she went silent again until they stopped, and then she continued. Two years of that in high school. To this day, I have an aversion to American history, with big gaps in my knowledge. It is only in the past few years that I have started to do any reading on the subject. Fortunately, my parents were of an age to tell me all about the Depression, WW2 and so forth.

[treestar]

52. It even extended to college

Whenever, I took US history from 1865 to the present, no class I ever took in that got as far as WWII. In fact, we didn't study the depression.

Granted, the Reconstruction was probably what we spent the time on. And the "Golden Age." One of my junior high classes got as far as WWI and its causes.

All of my knowledge of the era from 1900-1970 (when I could be said to be aware of current events) comes from magazines, books, documentaries, etc. - post-education stuff.

[RamboLiberal]

53. How right you are about this

The idiots on the right who scream about appeasers and Hitler do not know what they are talking about.

From the American perspective the "America First" movement was very much conservative and included many Republicans who fought vehemently against FDR in the late 30's up to Dec 6, 1941 to keep this country from getting involved in the war. Isolationism was a very strong movement in this country.

America was also very unprepared militarily. Our Army and Marine Corp was incredibly undermanned and underequiped. We could not match the very effecient tanks of Germany. Our Navy was also very short of aircraft carriers, and the planes in that Navy were for the most part no match for the Japanese aircraft at the time. They also lacked a reliable torpedo. Our Army Air Force was also very short and many of the planes were no match for either the German Luftwaffe or many of the Japanese. Fortunately we did have good bomber designs (though we would pay a horrendous price for our instance we could daylight bomb Germany), and we had a couple of good fighter designs.

No way could this country gone to war IMHO in 1939 or 1940. The U.S. was lucky that in FDR we had a president that overcame the isolationists to authorize a draft and begin a military buildup prior to our entry in to the war. And whether you believe or not that FDR knew the Japanese would attack us, or that FDR's policies pushed them in to that position, I doubt FDR could've taken this country to war w/o Pearl Harbor taking place.

My bet if Limbaugh, Hannity or any of the stupid RWs were broadcasting in that period of time they'd have been more like Father Coughlin and would've admired Hitler and his fight against communism and Bolshevism and keeping America out of Europe's war.

Getting back to our intervening at the time of Chamberlain's appeasement, the idiots of the RW act like the U.S. of that time was the mighty superpower they seem to believe we are today. We weren't at that time. Do they forget that it took us till mid-1944 before we had the manpower and equipment to land at Normandy? 1942 was a very bleak year for those who lived through it in this country. It very well looked like we could go down to defeat.

Getting back to Chamberlain I heard a radio caller to Thom Hartmann's show make a very good point today. He claimed that Great Britain had broken the German's code and that Chamberlain was only buying time for Great Britain to build up military. Now I don't completely buy the argument that Chamberlain was doing that, but his point was still valid. He did buy the time for the British to build up their forces, especially their air force with Spitfires and Hurricanes to battle the German bombers during the Battle of Britain. At the time Chamberlain signed the Munich Agreement there was no way Great Britain and France probably could've prevailed against Germany militarily.

WWII is still a war I do not completely understand. It still eludes me how a nation of supposedly civilized people could follow a leader like Hitler, become Nazis and ignore all the evil that occured. I really started to understand watching the Bush Administration, the Republicans and their sycophants during the last 8 years and those who refuse to see what is happening.

Those years are something I could spend a lifetime studying. It's too bad that our schools give that era such a short shrift in our schools. I think we'd be better served if our students were given an education on modern history. I'd make High Schoolers take 4 years of American History.

Freshman year: French & Indian Wars to Post-Civil War
Sophomore year: Late 1800's to just before Great Depression
Junior Year: Great Depression to the Cold War
Senior Year: Cold War to Present Day

In depth. More than dates and watered down facts. Delve in to it in depth and not just from the "American" POV.

[Greyhound]

54. With only 4 or 5 exceptions, I didn't learn anything in school.

It was all about obedience training, no education except for the aforementioned teachers that just threw the official curriculum out and taught what they knew.

[RamboLiberal]

55. Anyone remember watching the doc series "World at War"

It was originally made back in early 70's by British ITV. I remember one of the American Networks broadcast it. Does anyone remember which one? I was thinking ABC?

Shame they couldn't do something like that today instead of the endless Law & Orders, CSI, reality shows, etc.

Even the mini-series would be educational. I remember what an event the broadcast of Roots was. Now we get RW altered history crap like Path to 9-11.

I was inspired by this discussion to order the DVDS to World at War, looking forward to viewing this excellent series again.

The World at War is a 26-episode television documentary series on World War II, including the events leading up to it and following in its wake. The series was produced by Jeremy Isaacs for Thames Television (UK). Commissioned in 1969, it took four years to produce, such was the depth of its research. It premiered on ITV in 1973 at a cost of £4 million, a record (at the time) for a British television programme. The series was narrated by Laurence Olivier and its score was composed by Carl Davis. A book, The World at War, was written to accompany the series by Mark Arnold-Forster.

The series interviewed leading members of the Allied and Axis campaigns, including eyewitness accounts by civilians, enlisted men, officers and politicians, amongst them Albert Speer, Karl Dönitz, Jimmy Stewart, Bill Mauldin, Curtis LeMay, Lord Mountbatten, Alger Hiss, Toshikazu Kase, Charles Sweeney, Paul Tibbets, Anthony Eden, Traudl Junge and historian Stephen Ambrose.

Jeremy Isaacs says in "The Making of The World at War" (included on the DVD set) that he sought to interview, not necessarily the surviving big names, but their aides and assistants. The most difficult subject to locate and persuade to be interviewed, according to Isaacs, was Heinrich Himmler's adjutant, Karl Wolff. The latter admitted to witnessing a large-scale execution in Himmler's presence, thus effectively convicting himself of a war crime on television. No prosecution of Wolff followed, however.

It is often considered to be the definitive television history of the Second World War. Some consider it the finest example of the documentary form, although much critically important information, such as the systematic breaking of Germany's codes by Britain which allowed Germany's encrypted communications to be intercepted, remained classified at the time. It also presented rare colour film footage of some of the war's events.

In a list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes drawn up by the British Film Institute in 2000, voted for by industry professionals, The World at War ranked 19th.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_at_War

[JeffR]

57. Hell's freakin' bells, much of the electorate is clueless about

the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq five years ago, never mind wars of the mid-20th century.

[Hissyspit]

58. Much of the electorate is clueless about everything.

[JeffR]

59. True dat.

x(