I was watching Band Of Brothers with a group of people (The episode where they find the concentration camp)

No lie...No embellishment...No exaggeration...

I had to explain, in detail, to a 31 year old individual who Adolf Hitler was... Why "the Jews hated him so much"... Why the people were in the prison camp, and why they were so skinny.

This particular person was a straight A, honor roll student in high school...has a Master's degree in business management...and, is a corporate director for a national organization.

I asked her how she managed to get through school, and 31 years of life without ever hearing of Hitler or the Nazis.
She said she has heard the name (Like, when people compare a politician to "Hitler"... Or, call an overbearing person "Little Hitler", or "Nazi") but she never knew where the reference came from.

(She was horrified when I gave her a quick and dirty, abridged version of what happened in Nazi Germany).

I am still in disbelief  


On the bright side... She is VERY bright...And, she is now very interested to learn a little bit about history.  So, I am building a list of reading and viewing material for her.

I'm not saying your lying, but I have a hard time believing someone with that kind of education didn't know that.



I'm 25, and learned all about that during school, numerous times?





 

I had a friend of my niece ask me why the wrappers on the potatoes were so tight.

WOW!

Don't blame that one on the edumakashin sistam. We beat that Hitler and Holocaust shit to death. All my students already know about it before they get to my class.

That's gonna be a hard one to top.

because the zombie trolls who live underground used the shrinkwrap and heat gun for too long

I know how you feel. I keep thinking of the old "Those who fail to learn from history....". It's scary how many like her not only don't know, but don't care.

I had a 50+ year old professor that honestly didn't know if ducks could fly.

Threads like this make me want to go and lock my safe so I'm not tempted to blow my brains out.  



Decades of erasing history from common knowledge allows those in power to pretty much implement any shit they want.  There aren't enough people left to put two and two together and say "Wait a minute, this has happened before!".



We're living that nightmare right now.  

due to the false and invalid notion of godwins law, which most consider valid yet are wrong, there is little point to know about hitler or the nazis i suppose

note those who favor godwins law also favor slippery slope arguments be dismissed out of hand

She was fucking with you.

Or maybe she's not so dumb....

I present to you...... SHRINK wrapped potatoes  

Shit, way back in the 70s I was walking with two of my friends-guys that I still hang with-who went to a Catholic school.

Mind you, we lived in St. Louis.

As we were walking along I said, "Hey, did you hear Charles Lindbergh died?"

They were like:  "Huh?"

"You know-Charles Lindbergh-the guy that flew the Spirit of St. Louis across the fucking Atlantic Ocean non-stop? The guy that a fucking street that goes from one end of St. Louis county to the other is named after? THAT Charles Lindbergh?"

That was when I decided that a Catholic education was no better or worse than a public education (me).

I was showing her how to peel them for potato salad

Same here. Any public school I have seen teaches the holocaust very thoroughly. In all likelihood, she failed the educational system, it didn't fail her.

 

No, I can assure you, she wasn't.

Can you make hamburgers from ground beef?

Yes, but they can't see out of teh bun.

Bet she still doesn't know Stalin was orders of magnitude worse...

Yes, surely you meant she was referring to these individually wrapped baking potatoes.  Surely you do.  Please......  please tell me that's the case.  



ETA:  


Already addressed the issue while I was posting.  I am so disappointed, yet strangely not surprised.  

With the proper tercher, you can do anything.

That's okay if she's two.
Or hot.



 

Try 21 and hot.

Based on her knowledge of tight potato wrappers, I'm guessing she's not.  

ZING!  

Yeah my reply was suck dick til you make a million honey, cause I wouldn't let you work a cash register

I would agree with you, if not for the fact that she was a straight A student...And, has been very successful in college and her career.

When I went to highschool, the history classes went into some detail about the American Revolution, and the Civil War... but made very little reference to WWII, or the Holocaust.
MOSTLY, history class consisted of making you memorize dates of historical events.
I think the teachers were pretty much left up to their own preference about what parts of history they felt like teaching.

Pretty sure I learned most of my history outside of school.

This.



Either she is interested in you and trying to create common interest, or she is mocking you.



Depending on the context of your conversation, it could be either.



 

this

no..i honestly have worked with people who were like this.

The average person is pretty ignorant, and this applies to many who have gone through more modern and recent advanced schooling.  I found it interesting talking to a guy in his 80s who had a Master's and was a professor of history.  He said that the coursework required to get his high school diploma was more difficult and required much more thinking than what most colleges require now to get a Bachelor's Degree outside of very technical fields.  He also got his Master's fairly recently and said aside from more work from a physical perspective it was not harder to get than the Bachelor's degree he got in the late 1930s.  Standards seem to have dropped precipitously in the last century.  Heck, just look at the English curriculum from the 8th grade around the turn of the 19th century and compare it to today's college level English 101.  The 8th grade course from back then is more thorugh, advanced, and difficult, and that's just pon the grammar and spelling portion.

I actually wrote a paper on this and I think that part of the problem is that we go to school more for the certification because a job requires and just do whatever steps we have to to get there if we can and pay the required monies if necessary.  Education has also in many cases stopped being about discovering Truth, which is the key to genuine knowledge.  Rather, the focus seems to be more on facts or the sum of all facts and not much more, and that will only get you so far and is easily perishable in the mind.  I actually think this is the bigger problem.  

Just look at how an important figure might be addressed.  Let's say Niccolo Machiavelli gets brought up in a lesson.  Most of the time all you will be taught or just expected to know (with or without being told it directly) is his name, where he was from, that he wrote "The Prince," what his title or job was, and when he was born and died.  Knowig this is pretty much next to worthless.  You haven't learned anything from being able to recite these things.  What is important and what is only addressed by the best of instructors when and where they can is what the significance of his work was, how it impacted rulers and history, how it affected ideas regarding governance and politics, and what the philosophical or other origins of his writing are and how they are significant and impacted the contemporaries of Machiavelli; it is also good to know how he can be applied to day and his influence and presence (intellectually and practically speaking) in today's world.  The other facts are only needed to help put these things into context.  

With the holocaust, I have never seen it addrssed for more than a couple of weeks and you only are taught that it happened, that Hitler was behind it as well as the Nazis, that it was in the context of a world war, when it took place and where, and who the targets were and who and how many people died.  You learn that it was bad.  You learn about some girl named Anne Frank and that she wrote a diary and you read some parts of it.  Outside of that it is not approached very much.  It leaves the student with nothing to really give it significance, without an ability to understand why it happened and thus no ability to understand ways to prevent it from happening again in a political context, and without understanding the impact of those events upo history.  It just becomes a small set of facts easily dwarfed by all the others you are told and required to kow that one can easily forget about it, especially when it has no apparent application anywhere in their later life.  Given this and the fact that most people, at least three quarters, are not really all that bright and often could care less about history, it is not surprising to me at all that many people would be so ignorant, even someone with a Master's degree.  

If you want a real education you really have to take it upon yourself.  The schools for the most part will not give it to you.  I learned far more in independent studies on my own time than I ahve learned in all of my formal schooling combined.

That is a whole other chapter, and I'm quite sure she does not even know who Stalin was.


I HAVE been sucessful in converting her from being  a Liberal (Liberal because she did not follow politics AT ALL, and was influenced only by what she "heard").

Pics or BS

She is my girlfriend of six months.

She was not mocking.  She is completely ignorant of the subject.

Was she born and raised in the US?

oh sweet irony...

Yes

1 point to hellbound

Women Don't Know Anything About Wars







LOL.
But seriously, government controled public schooling has destroyed this country.

 
 

Why, was your wife busy?

My parents were both teachers.

I lost faith in the educational system looooooong ago (NOT because of them, but because of what they exposed me to).

I graduated highschool in 99.  About a week after we graduated a couple of friends and I were sitting around watching the news.  Something happened in Moscow and they showed a shot of the Kremlin while one of the anchors talked about the issue.  One of the girls in the group piped up "Thats a cool building.  I wonder where Moscow is.  I'd like to see that in person one day".  

The whole group gave her the WTF face. She really had no clue where it was or why it was important.

I concur

You don't have to be terribly smart or know anything of meaning to do well in school.  I didn't learn jack shit about history in school - they just want you to remember names and dates so you can pass a test.  The reasons for what happened, the change from the past, or effect on the current world - not important.

I thought he changed the spelling when he moved to South America!





 

Yea, yea... Irony acknowledged... Original post edited.  

I saw a tabloid that said he is teaching English in South America.

Every time I reach for the .45 to end it all, something wonderful happens.

The kid who asked me about my flight jacket. I told him I flew for Colonel Roosevelt in Cuba.

He said to me that I must have been a hot air baloon because the airplane wasn't invented for five years after the battle.

Not a lot of people do, and not many people know that Mao was an even more prolific killer.



If I remember right the numbers were something like:



Mao: 70 Million



Stalin: 17 Million



Hitler: 6 Million



I certainly didn't learn about Mao and Stalin in school. Hitler however was thoroughly covered