For anyone who believes that movies and TV shows are educational, read this shocking and dangerous information
Most American millennials don't know what Auschwitz was, a survey finds.
Despite the slaughter of nearly a million Jews — as well as hundreds of thousands of Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war and others — at the World War II Nazi death camp, a survey commissioned by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany found that 66 percent of Americans ages 18 to 34 "cannot identify what Auschwitz was." The figure for all adults was 41 percent.
The survey also found that 31 percent of all Americans and more than 4-in-10 millennials believe that 2 million Jews or fewer were killed during the Holocaust, substantially less than the historically accepted figure, which is closer to 6 million.
"I was astounded by those figures. This just goes to show the world forgets easily, and we pay a dear price for not remembering," said Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which works to promote awareness of European genocide.
As you consider that, consider the number of movies made about the Holocaust, especially since the 1980s till today, many of them seen by many millions, that isn't to mention TV shows, popular and more scholarly books, many of them best sellers, many of them assigned to college level readers, probably to high school students.
If this survey is accurate, this isn't only shocking and deplorable, it's extremely dangerous. It can't not be relevant to the rise of neo-Nazism and fascism and more petty anti-Semitism. I think it's also a consequence of the use to which the crimes of the Nazis have been put, the insistence of too many people that only the murders of Jews was worthy of mention, those murders more important than the murders of other groups, nationalities, religious identities, often in the same massacres and mass gassings that killed six million Jews.
But I think more than anything it is a result of the near exclusive concentration of STEM subjects in education. I had a discussion with my sister when the radio informed us that the great writer of children's books, Beverly Cleary had her 102nd birthday. She told me that reading and writing had been so demoted under Bush II's "No Child" and Obama's "Race To The Top" programs that teachers didn't assign books to be read, she said probably few of any of the students in the school she teaches in had ever read anything by Beverly Cleary.
You can't teach about the Holocaust, about the murders of the Nazis in math, science, engineering classes, especially when you're not really teaching anything except how to take commercial standardized tests. Considering that it is exactly that group who had that pushed as their education, so as to make them more profitable units to business and industry. But it is rather shocking that all of those movies, all of those TV shows failed to let them appreciate what they were about in those numbers.
The 20th century was a century of mass murder by governments using the resources of science, technology, engineering and math. Not the subject, THE PEOPLE WHOSE EDUCATIONAL TRAINING, IDEOLOGICAL INDOCTRINATION AND VIEW OF REALITY WERE FORMED BY THOSE, NOT BY THE HUMANITIES. That an emphasis on those in exclusion to history, especially recent history, reading, writing, reasoning, and, the morality which is necessary to even believe that the murders of millions of people is a matter of import and consequence, is certainly worth thinking about. And by thinking, I don't mean the activity of producing entertainment, show-biz, movies. Those clearly haven't gotten the job done.
Dumping the teach-to-the test miseducational regime which has been tried and found to fail has to happen, too. Retraining teachers indoctrinated in that crap has to be done too, older teachers will tell you that, the ones who used to teach reading, history, writing, and other topics necessary to egalitarian democracy instead of the production of people as productive units. People as productive units was the whole idea behind the Nazi murders of those deemed unproductive in some made up biology narrative.
"she said probably few of any of the students in the school she teaches in had ever read anything by Beverly Cleary. "
ReplyDeleteYou know what, Sparkles? I never read anything by Beverly Cleary either. But somehow, I still know that the idea of moving the Jews of Israel to Arizona is incredibly stupid.
Stupy, I'd probably be about the last person in the world to accuse you of having read a book, even the one you constantly reference - which was from the period before the Holocaust happened - is one I have read and so I know that, at most, you skimmed parts of it.
DeleteI never proposed "moving the Jews of Israel to Arizona" that's just a product of a. your limited reading ability, b. your habit of turning anything of even slight complexity into something simple enough for the Simels mind, c. your habitual lying. It's so you, in short.
Since you don't know anyone much under the age of 45 so what you know about millennials is all learned from listening to show biz gossip. It's so funny that self-obsessed straight guys like you and Duncan inevitably segregate yourself into the geezer ghetto while craving to be groovy and up to date.
I think that sentence is the only one he understood. Sort of.
DeleteIt's too bad he'd never read Beverly Cleary, he might have learned to read if he tried hard.
DeleteI think Dear Mr. Henshaw is one of the best children's novel of recent decades. It's one of the books I read to several of my nieces and nephews several times. She has a good understanding of how children think, the ones who can, not like the perennial infants of Eschaton.
"I never proposed "moving the Jews of Israel to Arizona"
ReplyDeleteUh, yes. You did.
I have never proposed that anyone be moved anywhere, unlike so many of the ministers of the Israeli government.
DeleteYou forget, Stups, I not only posted that entire exchange as found at Duncan's bargain basement production of School For Scandal, I posted the link to the exchange, I've pointed it out several times, you might remember, it was the occasion that one of your buddies proposed turning Florida into a "Jewish homeland" and you countered by making a "homeland for 'Gypsies'" in an abandoned mall in Jersey.
Your stupidity, illiteracy and dishonesty might not have understood what was said, and once you'd lied the lie you repeat it as you endlessly repeat everything (see Chatty Cathy doll comment earlier) and the idiots of Eschaton believed it because they as you, as I've learned from Eschaton so many atheists don't really care if something is true or a lie depending on which one they like. I can credit Duncan's cash cow with that, I don't think I'd have noticed that pattern unless I'd seen it there and on a few other pseudo-lefty blogs.
"Your stupidity, illiteracy and dishonesty might not have understood what was said,"
ReplyDeleteUh Sparkles -- stupidity, illiteracy and dishonesty are not sentient beings. They can't understand anything by definition.
Stups, take away stupidity, illiteracy and dishonesty from you and all you have left would be the most basic of physiological functioning that might allow you to swallow or breathe. Maybe we should run the experiment.
DeleteIf I'd said, "Trumps stupidity, illiteracy and dishonesty doesn't allow him to do much but lie," something that might be said of you, as well, that doesn't imply that those things are sentient beings exercising restraint, they are capacities, or, rather, incapacities of the minds of people like you and Trump.
"If I'd said, "Trumps stupidity, illiteracy and dishonesty doesn't allow him to do much but lie,"...
ReplyDeleteUh, a) you didn't. And b) that's like saying "I'd be cute if I had a different face."
Sorry, Sparky. You're an incoherent writer because you're an incoherent thinker.
Stupy, Stupy, Stupy, I doubt that anyone reading that comment but you would pretend to not understand the point of it. Though in your case it's probably not your pretense but that you're dense.
DeleteWhat you mean by "incoherent" is that what I say doesn't match your pre-existing prejudice that you learned by rote from movies, TV shows, and reading very short things in some of the easier venues of 20th century pseudo-leftishness. And gained by hearing your fellow fashionable fool in the lesser greater New York City area. As can be seen from the piece this these comments are made on, that's not a particularly reliable method of learning anything accurate or in any depth.
You don't think, you rearrange Colorforms. The Lefty Atheist Stereotype set of them. You'd fit in at the Left Forum but they wouldn't be impressed, you don't have the Super Jumbo set of those, you have the Eight Pack.