5 Historical Events Kids Should Know About, Even If They Aren't Taught in School

[MULTIZ321]

5 Historical Events Kids Should Know About, Even If They Aren't Taught in School
By Maureen Paschal/ On Parenting/ Perspective/ The Washington Post/ washingtonpost.com

"When I was in college, I told my friends that I chose history as my major because it was easy — I already knew what had happened. I was being facetious, but there was some truth to it as well; I started college with a good foundation in history.

After reading that two-thirds of millennials don’t know what Auschwitz was and that 22 percent either don’t know or aren’t sure what the Holocaust is, I’m wondering if kids are still arriving at college with that kind of broad knowledge of U.S. and world history. I know history teachers can’t teach everything (there isn’t enough time), which means that some events will go by the wayside as the curriculum evolves. But how do you leave out Auschwitz?

There is hope. Although I had good teachers, I also learned lots of history from my parents. I picked it up naturally and without a big fuss because my parents valued an understanding of history....."

(iStock)



Richard

 

[CanuckTravlr]

Ms. Paschal raises so many good points. Being an early baby boomer, WWII was a very real thing, being so recent. Intimate knowledge and perspective is lost over time. Canada also interned 22,000 Japanese Canadians living in British Columbia in 1942, following the Battles of Hong Kong and Singapore and the bombing of Pearl Harbor. They were initially moved to the interior of BC and then in 1944 moved to the east of the Rocky Mountains. Most were not fully freed until 1949. It is not considered one of Canada's finest hours, and in 1988 the Canadian Government made a formal apology and offered some compensation.

Many of today's kids are not aware of this history. Nor of the Cold War, except as an abstract concept. I remember air raid siren tests and learning to duck under our desks at school if an attack came. I also remember living in Canada's capital of Ottawa in 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis. I had about a 15-20 minute walk to school. My father was an air force officer who at that time was an ABC weapons specialist (Atomic, Biological, Chemical).

With the US naval embargo around Cuba, and both Kennedy and Kruschev standing their ground, the nuclear war clock was just a minute or two from striking midnight. My father walked me to and from school one evening. He told me that if the sirens went off, before or after a certain point in my walk, I was to run either to home or to school and seek shelter. If I was in between those points I needed to find a wall or other cover to lie down behind and he identified a few possible locations. If a bomb went off, I was not to look up!! We had never had that talk before. That is how serious the situation was and most kids today have no idea. Some of my older neices and nephews were fascinated when I recounted that story recently.

I also find it hard to believe that current generations know so little about the Holocaust and camps like Auschwitz. My father was present during the trial of the Nazi SS female guards at Bergen-Belsen camp in western Germany in 1945. I have a photo of them lined up outside one of the buildings taken during or just after the trial. During my first backpacking trip to Europe after university I made a point of visiting the camp at Dachau, just outside Munich. It was obvious that the ovens in the camp were not designed to bake bread, claims by conspiracy theorists to the contrary notwithstanding.

During that same trip I visited West Berlin, transiting by train through the Russian zone with armed Russian guards boarding the train during the journey. I stood looking at the Brandenburg Gate surrounded by walls and barbed wire, the abandoned Reichstag and over the Berlin Wall into East Berlin with all the watch towers, barbed wire, killing zones and armed guards. I obtained a day pass and crossed through the actual Checkpoint Charlie (now a tourist display) into East Berlin. The contrast between the drab, gray East Berlin and the prosperity and bright lights of the Ku-Dam in West Berlin was literally like night and day. Today the Wall is down and Berlin is once again a united and vibrant city. I have a nephew studying architecture in Berlin. He was only vaguely aware of all this.

It is so important that today's generations learn this history. The Greatest Generation is now passing into history. The torch now passes to us to ensure that these hard lessons learned are not lost and that another generation also learns them, so as not to repeat them.

 

[bbodb1]

Richard!

Please don't post articles behind pay walls! Arrrrgghhh!

I do want to take a moment to thank you for your contributions though. I end up seeing many articles I likely other wise would not - you are the human amalgamator!

 

[MULTIZ321]

Richard!

Please don't post articles behind pay walls! Arrrrgghhh!

I do want to take a moment to thank you for your contributions though. I end up seeing many articles I likely other wise would not - you are the human amalgamator!

Hi bbodb1,

I try not to post articles behind pay walls but sometimes I miss.

Now about this particular posting - when I click on the link, using my Firefox browser - I'm able to read the entire article without it being behind a paywall. So I'm not
sure what happened when you tried to read it.

Thanks for the kind world about other articles I've posted that you are able to read.

Best Regards,

Richard

 

[am1]

My guess with more stuff being internet based this will happen more often. The info will be there but buried behind a lot of other newer info. I tell my wife the same with photos. People have thousands but what happens when phone or computers or changed/lost or even cloud services go under or replaced?

 

[Adventureisoutthere]

I’m a millennial (mid 30s) and while I have heard of all topics listed in the article, I’m not sure I could recall what the history on each subject matter was if asked point blank. I definitely didn’t learn about “modern” history in high school; it was mostly pre WW1. I thankfully have parents that are history buffs that read a lot which has piqued my interest and now I read about history as well. I never understood why as we go through k-12 that modern history is one of the last subjects being taught.


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[pedro47]

Thanks Richard, great information now parents asked your children this question. Do they know these Five (5) Historical Events and asked them to explain their answers?
Finally, do not let your children use the internet to answer this question.

 

[Jan M.]

I remember when our son who is now 31 was in high school and his history teacher was talking about Vietnam. My husband was in the Navy and has a Vietnam service medal because he served on the USS Enterprise while they were anchored offshore doing bombing runs into Vietnam. I was attending a branch campus of Kent State at the time of the shooting deaths when the National Guard fired on the student protesters. Anyhow during dinner our son brought up what was said in the classroom discussion knowing we were very familiar with the Vietnam War. I was very upset that our son didn't have a very good understanding and seemed misinformed by the history teacher who was only in his twenties. My husband was calmer and gave our son an on the spot history lesson. After he was done with that I explained to our son how during our years of high school the guys who were seniors worried about their draft number. That if they had a lower number and their parents couldn't afford college so they got a student deferment they stood a very good chance of going to Vietnam. I also had to explain that it wasn't as easy to get into college back then as it is now. He couldn't imagine going through your senior year with something like that hanging over your head. He asked his Dad what his number had been and if it bothered him. My husband told our son that he enlisted in the Navy after he turned 18 at the start of his senior year as he wanted to try to get into Navy's nuclear program. And he was accepted into the program after basic training. We went on to tell our son how many of our friends and acquaintances had served in country that he didn't know that about because most of them still didn't talk about it thirty years later.

Many people in my age group, the Vietnam era, also grew up with grandfathers or great uncles who served in WWI and fathers or uncles who served in WWII or Korea. And the grandparents and parents of those in my age group lived through the Depression. When I was in high school we did cover WWI some. WWII and Korea were seen as recent past and we were surrounded by people who lived it. Our son probably learned more about WWII from watching movies with my husband than he did in school.

 

[geist1223]

A couple of years ago we had a dinner party. The Guests ranged in age from 70's to 20's. After dinner we played a Trivia Game. To answer a lot of the questions you had to know some history. The old folks cleaned the young folks' clocks. The young folks wanted to know how we knew so many of the answers. We told them from studying History in school many decades ago. As part of our regular classes we had studied from Ancient Mesopotamia to Greeks, to Romans, to Egypt, to Europe, to China, to the modern age, etc. Every couple years we would go back and start again but more in depth but faster in time.

They said that their schooling did not cover this depth of information.

I also remember when I was a kid there was a series of Books - "You are there with - Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, Hannibal, the Crusades, etc."

Phrasing someone - If you do not study history and learn from it you are doomed to repeat it.

 

[pedro47]

We also studied science, literature, physics, American History. We have to learned the Constitution and their amendments, etc.
We went to school to learn how to add, subtract, multiply, divide and we did not go to school to pass a standardized learning testing.

 

[rhonda]

Richard!

Please don't post articles behind pay walls! Arrrrgghhh!

I do want to take a moment to thank you for your contributions though. I end up seeing many articles I likely other wise would not - you are the human amalgamator!

Often Safari's "Reader" mode will defeat the pay wall. Works for me on the Washington Post articles, San Diego Union Tribune and several other sites. Not all sites ... but many.

 

[Ken555]

High school and college aged students I know have zero interest in and an extreme lack of knowledge of history. Public education (at least in my area) generally does a horrible job of this, with notable exceptions (I know one history teacher who is superb).

Even worse than the lack of history, and the ramifications of not knowing it, is that the younger generation simply doesn't read except when forced to do so. They have a skewed version of reality, with obvious consequences for us all.

It's just sad.


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