In another post, someone (I think it was Susan) said that in a few years they will be speaking of the 'good old days'. That got me to thinking.....

Back when I was in college, the college rented out the dorms to summer camps. In the evenings they would have dances and things on campus for the 'kids' to go to. One night they played Billy Joel's- We didn't start the fire- all of the kids were singing along and having a great time.....A friend of mine an I were talking and when the song stopped, I had the opportunity to make a great point....I asked about 10-12 kids about some of the lyrics...."Hey guys... what does....
Dien Bein Phu....
U2........
Red China.....
Richard Nixon.....
Bay of Pigs......... Mean to you ?

Not one of them had a clue as to what the song talked about...Yeah they knew a few of the 'newer' ones but even then only a few of them knew them. BTW BJ wrote that song in response to someone saying something to him like, 'Oh you had it easy growing up...what ever happened when you were a kid?'

Still I try to maintain hope......But yesterday, while leaving a patient at the hospital, I overheard a conversation of someone who it turned out was one of the crewman on the Enola Gay. WOW!!!!! I thanked him for his service and after a few minutes, went on my way a little richer intellectually. I couldn't help but to tell several people of the meeting....'guys' I work side by side with. I guess I told 20 people....would you belive only 2 knew what the Enolay Gay was and what part it played in history !?!?!? Mind you.....none of them was younger than 25!

My hope is quickly fading........

I had a young lady of undergraduate age come up with this one during a class discussion of Cuba:

"If this Castro guy is so awful, how does he keep getting elected?"

I laughed out loud, but the scary thing is that no one else did.

well, if it makes you feel better, I'm 29. And so far, I know every one of those things you're talking about.

Then again, the Nixon Presidential Library IS 5 miles from my house, and my mom is a high school history teacher...

Scary stuff. One day, I was watching the History Channel with my then high school senior son, now 23. After watching awhile, turned to me and asked, "When were we ever at war wuth Japan"? He'd never been taught any of this in school. Talk about the dumbing down of America!

I was speechless. He is now a history buff, so there is hope.

History is wasted on the young. They just haven't experienced enough of life to appreciate its meaning. Be patient with them ... they'll learn soon enough. Yes, they'll cast some goofy votes until they "grow up", they'll think they have all the answers, they'll think they know what life is about, but eventually they will grow up. At least most of them do.

That is one of the reasons I've committed so much of my time to Scouting - both Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. My goal is to expose the boys and girls to as many experiences as possible and to provide them with a good moral base to start out with. The Scout Law says it all - "A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent." Experience, trial, failure, success - its all a key part of growing up.

I've often said that the miracle of children is that they are the closest thing we have to immortality. That is the amazing thing about being a parent. They - all of them - are our future!

--- Ha, I wrote this before seeeing ScoutMan's post. How fitting.

I just read on CNN.com that 1 in 4 people questioned (3000 in the survey) in England believe that Winston Churchill, Ghandi and Cleopatra are fictional characters, and many questioned believed that Sherlock Holmes is a real person - go figure?

Didn't somebody once say 'Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it' I suppose that appies to ignorane of the past as well.

Interesting, as a kid I remember taking a field trip to the movies to see “Tora, Tora, Tora” when we were studying WWII. Just watching old war movies (and even some of the new ones: Saving Private Ryan, Pearl Harbor, Code Talkers, Great Raid) should at least give you an idea of who was at war with whom and general sense of when.

Even the events of 911 are becoming a distant memory for so many.

Pete

I have on multiple occasions within the past few years mentioned Xenophon's March. Few knew anything about it, including some people with some advanced degrees from good universities, and even a professor with a philosphy Ph.D. And this shows how our teaching of everything has changed.

FWIW, Xenophon was a Greek who with a Greek mercenary force went to preseant-day Iraq, for a war involving two claimants to the Persian throne in about 401 B.C. One claimant died in the one battle of the war, and so the war was over. The Persians then acted to get rid of the Greeks. The Greeks eventually made it back to Greece.

Xenophon wrote the story and his version of the story was studied into the 19th Century by people learning Greek. If you knew any one with a university education in the 19th Century, you could make a good bet that they knew greek and that part of their study of Greek included reading Xenophon story of the March. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenophon.

Same thing goes for Cicero and people who studied Latin. These langauges were a a part of most university educations, prior to the 20th century. Now, few people know of these things because history has been written out of courses on other topics besides history. When we study language, we rarely study the historic writings of that language or anything to do with history.

Same goes for things we read for our own language. In the U.S., we rarely read things with any historical significance when we study English. Instead, students read mostly works of fiction with little or no history in them but which are written to invoke a theme or view point.

We are not a culture that respects history, because for the msot part, many do not wish to learn the lessons it has to teach. It is much easier to ignore these lessons, when knows nothing of it. For this same reason, you find people who do not prepare for potentially likely disasters, unlike most of the people who post here and have prepared to some extent.

Rather than lawyers, I think the majority of congress should
be historians.

After a few minutes of 'small talk' when a new neighbor came over to introduce himself, his reply to my mother's mention of being a history major was "All the history I need is in the Bible!" Needless to say, they did not become fast friends.