I have students (16-24yo, rural Oregon) who have no idea what the Holocaust was. Or they think WWII occurred in the 1960’s.
These are kids / young adults who sucessfully completed middle school. The mind boggles.
And I just asked my 13yo son if he knew what the Cuban Missile Crisis was. He proceeded to give me a 10 minute synopsis, with an added abstract about the Bay of Pigs invasion. Pretty much spot on.
So there’s one data point.
Ask him about the Bengal Famine, the Salt March, the 2002 Deployment and get back to me,
(Seriously, a smart kid, you have there).
For the longest time every outspoken Canadian on the internet talked about how proud they were of their country burning down the White House, despite the fact Canada had literally nothing to do with it besides the fact they were involved in the war in which it occurred. If you asked them where they learned it they all say they were taught it in high school which is pretty bizarre.
And some of them are college graduates.
One of my coworkers (Spaniard, from Madrid) had no idea that WWII had involved any doings around Dunkirk. We stared at him and then the team lead said “I’d throw you into the harbor, but I need you dry and alive.” We asked him where he thought it had taken place and he just had no idea. He didn’t know if Pearl Harbor and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had taken place in the same war or not. Similar depth on anything related to art or literature. Apparently he would just cram before the exams and that was it.
Profesionally, he’d been a programmer before getting certified as a SAP Finance consultant a few months before we met him: he could recite whole chunks of the kind of stuff that goes into the certification exam, but if you asked him to explain the most basic concepts he couldn’t, not with his own words (sometimes he did remember the official definition).
In 11th grade, my History teacher set us a “free subject” report. When we delivered them, he’d snerk or giggle at some and put them on the left; others, he’d roll his eyes at and put them on the right. He seemed happy that the left pile was about 2x the right one. When we asked what had been the selection criteria, he said “when you’re grown up you’ll understand it”, prompting a choral rolleyes.
Many years later we did understand it. Those of us whose reports went left had written about historical events which were not mentioned at all in our books or about the Carlista Wars (which got a picture of “the Pretender Don Carlos” in the 8th-grade book with no further explanation). The others had used taught material. My own paternal family referred to the Guerra Civil of 1936 as “the sixth (Carlista War)” and had taken part in all of them. Those of us on the left pile had taken the report as an excuse to dive into stuff that we’d heard mentioned at home but never been taught about; many other people either don’t have that kind of curiosity or don’t have families with stories about when Grandpa was in the war.
North Korea is one place where people have been kept shockingly unaware of world events and world history.
One academic study reported that North Korea’s domestic media never covered the U.S. moon landing. (And at the time, there was zero access to foreign media.)
The situation may have changed somewhat in the last 20 years, as multimedia like thumb drives, CD-ROMs and the like are now routinely smuggled over the Chinese border.
But for the second half of the 20th century, the North Korean population was sealed off from the rest of the world to an astounding degree.
Further comment to some subsequent responses. It’s reasonably free of US national bias to include World War II, though it didn’t affect literally 100% of the world. What discrete historical event is less tied to one country? 9/11 is obviously somewhat more US-centric, but OTOH the US is the foreign country (from POV outside the US) most people in the world are most aware of besides their own and immediately neighboring countries. And 9/11 had international implications, various large terror attacks in Europe not as much. It isn’t just US-centrism to view 9/11 as a bigger event than the UK 7/7 attacks. But let’s throw it out anyway. Landing on the moon though I think qualifies as a historical human achievement which happened to be achieved by Americans (at least directly, not in every indirect aspect) and not a US event.
Some of the responses have gone on to characterize official national consensus opinions taught in the schools of various countries about what was most important in or about WWII. That’s obviously going to differ though. Japanese or Chinese students taught arguably distorted versions of WWII (including the complex of wars starting in the 1930’s) have still heard of it and have a ‘real idea’ (maybe not your idea) what it was. I contrast that with people interviewed on the street who have heard the term, their mom and dad liked ‘Saving Private Ryan’ or something, but have no real idea what WWII was. And that is not really not limited to ‘home schooled’ people, it applies to probably a much larger absolute number, arguably not a higher %, of products of the public schools, as far as the US.
I’m working in a warehouse with a lot of poorer 20-somethings who may “sort of know” about a lot of things but -------. They know there was a WW II but they have no idea just when it was or what it was really about. Seriously. They know POTUS JFK was killed but beyond that nothing. Civil War they know a little and civil rights and some other urban/inner-city history like the decline of the mills and all. But so many things are just a mystery. It comes out a lot in some of the jokes I tell. We had a box fall and bounce in an impossible fashion off a couple of us. I said something to the effect of “We got a Magic Bullet - call Zapruder he may want to film it”. One lady in her late 40s had a good chuckles but the 4 kids looked at us like “what you talkin about Willis” ------ another joke that’s totally lost on them.
Chinese outside of the major cities and without internet access (censored or not) probably have no idea or concern about global events. Their only source of information may be the official government sponsored newspaper or their local newspaper with select non-local news culled from the official paper.
Even those within the cities without unrestricted internet access may not be are of “major” global events.
Define “Major Historical Events.”
I was recently in Taiwan. When I visited museums, the displays would often refer to time periods or people that I’d never heard of and had no context for at all or had very little knowledge of because when I was in American schools, there was little to no emphasis on Chinese history and I’ve never really learned much since. (“The _____ period”? No clue.) They were written like major events and I was lost.
For as much as people say they never use math again - I’ve never used history since school, except to tutor kids in history. Sure it helps me understand things… but I could easily live my day-to-day life without that understanding. It doesn’t help me at work. It doesn’t help me at home. On the other hand, I won’t be able to finish my part of Thanksgiving dinner without algebra.
Hell, they’ll resist even having it explained to them they’re wrong. It is approximately equivalent to Americans expressing pride at winning the Battle of Stalingrad.
People around the world are, on average, pretty ignorant of history, so we can tell horror stories all day. It’s common in every country, amongst every people.
I once worked with someone who thought Pol Pot was a winner on Britains Got Talent.
I never heard of the war of 1812 until I was an adult.
I was in Berlin for a conference and a fellow conference attendee - a young woman from Malaysia - was unaware that Germany (and Berlin) had been divided into East and West.
Oh Lord. There’s still a BIG chunk of the UK population who think that.
Here’s an experiment you can do yourself. Google <daily express princess diana> and use the Tools to limit the search to the last week.
Three articles published today.
j
A few years ago, on November 22nd, I asked a few of my co-workers (all very intelligent people) the significance of the date. A couple of them were in their late 30s, and didn’t have a clue, even after I added the year. One was just a year or two younger than me, and said it was familiar but couldn’t place the reason why.
I was 11 years old on November 22nd (1963) and will never forget the tragedy that occured that day, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. I didn’t really expect the younger guys to know, but the one nearest in age to me was a surprise.
Before the Soviet Union’s collapse, Russian children were taught that Angela Davis was a very prominent public figure in the U.S. For some time she was, but not so much by the 1980s, when I saw this on TV.
Is it odd for an adult American to have never eaten Pol Pot?
Wait ---- you eat it? I thought you smoked it. Explains why it was so hard to get it rolled!
War of Jenkins’ Ear. For example :).