Education, education, education.................

[dipsydoodle]

The survey, conducted by Erskine, which takes care of around 1,350 war veterans, asked 2,000 children aged nine to 15 a number of questions about the Second World War and got some astonishing results.

One in six of respondents said they thought that Auschwitz is a theme park based on the Second World War. One in 20 said that the Holocaust was the celebration of the end of the war, whilst one in ten said they believed that the SS were Enid Blyton’s Secret Seven.

One in twelve thought The Blitz was a huge cleanup operation after the war, a quarter believed that D-Day stood for “Dooms Day” and thought that a nuclear bomb was dropped on Pearl Harbour.

Around 40 per cent of children did not know that Remembrance Day was 11 November, while 12 per cent thought the McDonalds logo was the symbol of Remembrance Day.

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/20091105/remembrance-day-approaches-one-six-children-think-auschwitz-istheme-park-and-one-ten-think-hitler-wa_all.htm

Well done Tony Fucking Blair and New Labour.

[non sociopath skin]

1. I can see why a survey like this is a gift to the red-tops, but I'm more than a little suspicious ..

All of the headline "results" on the Erskine charity's website

http://www.erskine.org.uk/news/general-news/

are, in fact, negative spin and, as usual we have to click on and read the small print to get the positives. (For the record 6.2% of those surveyed thought the Holocaust was a celebration - a whopping 85% knew what it actually was!)

How old were the youngsters surveyed (wonder how well I would have done in a survey about the figures and acronyms of the Boer War as an eleven year-old in the early 60s?)? How do we know that some of the kids who gave the minority answers weren't "taking the piss," to put it bluntly. They have been known to do that when patronised ...

Meanwhile, a huge majorities of them DID know rather a lot about the events a century or a half century before they were born. Do a survey of Joe Public around the boozers on Saturday night and see how many know that Archduke Franz Ferdinand's assassination caused WW1.

A more cynical man than I might suggest that this is simply a little-known regional charity trying to grab some national publicity and donations away from the Haig Fund monopoly of Remembrance Day and flog some education packs.

The Skin

[Mr Creosote]

5. I think the kids come out of that pretty well. Better than the Erskine Trust.

Really would expect grown-ups to know that WW1 ended in 1919 with the Treaty of Versailles, and that Pearl Harbor wasn't a suicide attack.

US lies about WMDs seem to have worked on the kids though.

[LeftishBrit]

2. Twas Ever Thus...

'1066 and All That', published in the 1930s, satirizes history teaching and learning, and the confusions that it produced.

In case it is seen as over the top fiction, 'I have a book, 'History as She is Wrote', published in 1930, by an examiner for the then School Certificate, including lots of excerpts from real pupils' exam answers: 'Queen Elizabeth executed all those who would not swear that she was the Pope'; 'King Henry liked the photo of Anne of Cleves'; etc.

One of my classmates in the early 1970s thought that Napoleon had been Prime Minister of England.

[non sociopath skin]

3. But the point is surely, LB, that those "howlers" were presented as "one-offs" ...

... rather than searing condemnations of schools, society, youngsters and all their works!

Nowadays, were the Sun to discover your friend's ignorance, they'd doubtless run a "1 in 30 children think Napoleon was English" headline.

The Skin

[LeftishBrit]

4. Interestingly...

I have a book, "Born for Joy", by Mary Wedd, published in 1969, and dealing with the author's experiences of teaching in a village school in the early 1960s. In one place, she writes:

'The children's ideas about recent history were confused in the extreme. One child asked me if Winston Churchill was the King of England. Another thought he was a survival from the Civil War! I believe it was Karen... who later did a picture labelled 'World War 1' in which jet aeroplanes flew overhead, a rocket was standing upright in a corner ready to be launched, and soldiers on horseback galloped towards it brandishing swords and bows and arrows.'

[Anarcho-Socialist]

6. I recall similar articles in the papers in the 1990s

There's nothing like some good ol' moral panic to fill the gaps in some shite newspapers.