Thursday, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, as my Twitter began to fill with stories of near-death escapes or children killed too young in a concentration camp, it also filled with the story of a disappointing study, the reaction to which was just as bad. According to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, they interviewed 1,350 adults and found two-thirds of American millennials surveyed could not identify Auschwitz — the largest concentration camp where more than 1 million of Jews were exterminated — and 22 percent said they haven’t heard of the Holocaust or are not sure whether they’ve heard of it.
Albeit disturbing, even maddening, given the atrocity of the Holocaust itself and how indicative it was of Hitler’s deranged, anti-Semitic mind, it’s not shocking that young adults don’t know about the Holocaust or Auschwitz. Millennials, especially the younger ones, are really the first generation to receive an education that has placed more importance on social justice issues rather than an emphasis on history, language, math, and science. They’re the ones about whom the phrase “social justice warriors” was first coined. In the last two decades, there’s been a steady uptick in school administrators figuring out how they can “promote social justice.” This website provides multiple resources for teachers to integrate social justice issues into their curriculum but warns many kids could be offended if it’s not taught carefully.
If you teach social studies, you’ll have no trouble finding direct curricular links to social justice. The National Curriculum Standards for the Social Studies includes Civic Ideals and Practices as one of its 10 Themes of Social Studies, and this includes an emphasis on learning how to get involved in influencing public policy. In history and social studies class, social justice teaching is a natural fit.
This is the problem with focusing on “Black Lives Matter” or the pronoun debate — rather than definitive truth or facts (or even just teaching kids “how” to think, not “what” to think, which is what a classical model does), offending kids seems to matter as much to teachers as it does teaching them facts. This is not only bizarre but irrelevant: Since when is education about feelings rather than facts?
Millennials born in 1996 are about 22 now, and they’re the ones arguing with people like Dr. Jordan Peterson about whether or not he will refer to them on college campuses with their preferred pronoun because they’re now transgender or “non-binary.”
Yet they’re so preoccupied with narcissistic drivel they aren’t even sure what the “Holocaust” is? How very progressive; how very blind.
Since kids know more about bullying or LGBTQ rights than historical events like the Holocaust, they not only are sadly ignorant of history, which is its own price to pay, but it comes at an even greater cost: They lack the perspective needed to appreciate education or other things. If the only thing you’re worried about is being a biological male who dresses as a woman and would like to be addressed as “they,” you lack the proper perspective to know to be thankful you weren’t a Jew living in Poland in 1942.
[Also read: Social justice warriors ruin college statistics curriculum by including social justice]
Still, we owe it to our adults, our college students, and our high school students to tell them about the grave atrocities of the world so they may see history as it is, not as they wish it to be, and so that they may never repeat it. It’s our moral obligation to teach difficult historical facts, not the fantasy world of someone’s feelings and emotions and uprisings over words and that exist on a moving scale that blows along with the news cycle. If millennials don’t know about one of the worst attacks on Jews in modern history, it’s because we sent them to schools and teachers who failed to see that as a priority. Our job as adults is to figure out why, and to prevent such ignorant attempts at education in the future so the next generation is not even more ignorant.
This year, while studying World World II, my 11-year-old learned about the Holocaust for the first time. We studied books, watched a few short documentaries, and discussed the facts first, before I asked him finally, “What do you think?” He shook his head. “How could anyone do such a thing?”
If young adults don’t even know about Auschwitz, how can they ask such a question? If adults know young people aren’t learning these things, how can we mock them for their ignorance?
Nicole Russell is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist in Washington, D.C., who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota. She was the 2010 recipient of the American Spectator’s Young Journalist Award.
