Youth today.

[gunnss]

Actually it is not so diffrent from my generation. My Grandfather was a Sergent in the Somme during WWI. As I attended school the Great War was almost trivialized by the Second war, I remember the survivors as they disappeared, with changes in society and culture over shadowing the past. I am a Gulf War I vet, and our whole experience is almost completely discounted by the present group of pundit's. It is just a cycle, I remember the last Civil War vet dying.... time passes and the past is lost on the present generation. They were making the same complaint in Rome and Carthage.

Regards,
Kevin

[moot]

All of history is important.

[SirFrancis]

A good friend of mine is a teacher at Georg Junior High in Springdale/AR. Once in a year, her students write me letters and ask me about Germany, the holocaust, Nazis and what my grandparents did during WWII. I answer to every letter. Well, I am 40 years old and didn't have any personal experience about WWII but I have many info's from my grandparents I can share. I even drove up to the KZ Dachau by Munich to get some info material (books, DVD, posters), that I sent over to Springdale.

[MiloMorai]

I was in high school in the early 60's and we barely learned anything about WW1 and WW2. We learned what brought on the 2 wars and what happened after they ended but zilch of the happening during the wars.

[CAVPFCDD]

Ok, ive got to say this. I was in history class today and we were talking about WW2. And i may be only 18 but im sure i know a hell of a lot more about WW2 in general then my teacher. But i was sitting there and seen that no one knew the answers to any of the questions.

It's sad that young people today dont know a lot about WW2 or probably dont care. I for one feel like people should learn about it while they can the generation of WW2 pilots/military is sadly not going to last much longer. And when that time comes it's just going to be another page in the history books.

I was just wondering if anyone is trying to preserve a peace of WW2 history. I myself has a grandfather that was in WW2, a B17 pilot with the 8th air force. And over the summer i picked his brain for info and we spend weeks going through all of his WW2 stuff he kept. I few items we found was his B17 pilots manual(great condition) his notes he took while he was in flight school. And tons of mission statements from him and his crew as well as other squads.

half my family lives in norway so I had the privelage of hearing stories about the resistance movement there from my grandfather. There are all sorts of pill boxes and other concrete buildings near my grandmothers house, found shell casings and what not, they were all placed facing the water so I'm not sure if they were orginally norwegian military or german.

My grandfather told me a cool story about how one day he was in his home city of Bergen when the resistance managed to blow up a german supply boat docked in the harbor. He was outside at the time working on a roof when this huge blast went off. He said for blocks around every window in the city was blown out, and that needless to say the germans were pretty ticked off after that.

My grandmother told me stories about how the Germans were always so nice to her, she was fairly young at the time. She was a local cafe where she usually would hang out and her mother came in and took her away and yelled at her since she had been talking to german soliders in there. The norwegians got lucky as far as treatment from the germans since most norwegians are aryans, however the norwegian people for the most part were not fond of the germans at all.

She also lived on a fjord, so she said there would always be huge German warships passing by, given the area she lived in I've come to the conclusion that she may have seen the Bismark at some point aswell.

[bongaroo]

Without learning history we are doomed to repeat it.

[Cthulhu]

Without learning history we are doomed to repeat it.

Wise words...

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted, it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience.
George Santayana, The Life of Reason, Volume 1, 1905

There's a political message in there somewhere

Given present society's short attention span, and the encouragement of self-absorbed lifestyles, I'd have to modify your statement to read:
History, we are doomed to repeat it.

[Bosco123]

I'm taking American History Honors this year, as a junior, and I find the guy that is teaching it, is incredibly biased to the liberal side. I've got into some political arguments about G.W.B and the guy that's in right now. It was funny, he was telling us about Upton Sinclair and Clarence Darrel, telling them that they were the best of the best, both in being a lawyer, and the other being a writer. I started a project on Upton Sinclair, since he was the only one I knew at the time.

Come to find out that both Clarence Darrel and Upton Sinclair are socialist.

It just goes to show you that it's not just colleges that have the bias, but its going to the high schools now too.

[avionix]

I think that for the majority, it is all about me and what is good for myself.  Even though I graduated over ten years ago, I remember many of my fellow classmates not caring about history.  And many of them had grandfathers that served in WWII.  Mine were young enough to have just missed any action.  In fact, my grandfather missed Korea. (Was on a troop ship on the way when word came the war was over and they turned around.  They did make a practice run on Iwo though.)  When I asked them aobut their grandfathers, they did not know much.  They said they never asked or thought about it.  It would be very sad to know how many stories have been lost by people not asking those brave men about their experiences.

[Cthulhu]

I'm taking American History Honors this year, as a junior, and I find the guy that is teaching it, is incredibly biased to the liberal side. I've got into some political arguments about G.W.B and the guy that's in right now. It was funny, he was telling us about Upton Sinclair and Clarence Darrel, telling them that they were the best of the best, both in being a lawyer, and the other being a writer. I started a project on Upton Sinclair, since he was the only one I knew at the time.

Come to find out that both Clarence Darrel and Upton Sinclair are socialist.

It just goes to show you that it's not just colleges that have the bias, but its going to the high schools now too.

Bosco, pass this along to your teacher:

Those who can...  do
Those who can't...  teach
Those who can't teach...  teach teachers    

I've had enough run-ins with teachers to have a pretty strong opinion on this issue. Strong enough, in fact, to have my daughter in private school.

[bongaroo]

I'm taking American History Honors this year, as a junior, and I find the guy that is teaching it, is incredibly biased to the liberal side. I've got into some political arguments about G.W.B and the guy that's in right now. It was funny, he was telling us about Upton Sinclair and Clarence Darrel, telling them that they were the best of the best, both in being a lawyer, and the other being a writer. I started a project on Upton Sinclair, since he was the only one I knew at the time.

Come to find out that both Clarence Darrel and Upton Sinclair are socialist.

It just goes to show you that it's not just colleges that have the bias, but its going to the high schools now too.

Shhh...your trying to kill our topic with politics!  I could go into detail about how crappy GWB was but let's stay on topic, eh?

[VansCrew1]

I just think most of the kids today could care less about what happened almost 70 years ago. If not for the US involvement , we all may be speaking German.

edit: i just started this thread to vent, i being a military family thinks that our vets should get a lot of respect for what they done and what they have sacrificed.


Vets

[RoGenT]

Sad to say, at the years go on the youth of today is going to care less and less about what happened in those dark days.  As for me when I was in HS, I couldn't wait until we got into WW2 but it didn't seem to cover it too long.


  to the vets as well, regardless of what country they were from

[VansCrew1]

We talked about WW2 in history for maybe 2 class periods.

[Bosco123]

Shhh...your trying to kill our topic with politics!  I could go into detail about how crappy GWB was but let's stay on topic, eh?

I'm sure you could, but I could come up with a lot more things on the president now, then you will with GWB, and he's only been in 3 months. Let's do keep it on topic.