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Comment by CapitalistCartr | Hacker News Reader

More than one in five young Americans doesn't know when WWI & WWII were, what countries were on which side, why they started, or what's imortant about them. But these kids will get better, same as we did. This headline isn't good, but I wouldn't take it too badly.

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> But these kids will get better, same as we did.

Education standards in America has been falling no matter which way you look at it. That will have to reverse first.

The article states that the trend spans education levels.

Education levels != education standards. Consider that GPAs have been going up over time[0], so much so that nearly 80% of all grades at Harvard in recent years were As and A-s.

[0]: https://mises.org/power-market/grade-inflation-harvard-and-y...

[1]: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/10/5/faculty-debate-...

If they don't know, the answer would be don't know, but not making up their mind that its a myth.

The issue is that the "young" demographic mentioned in the article is ages 18-29, and high school must have changed quite a bit in recent years if students have not actually heard about the holocaust or WWII.

We'd have to compare against a similar poll from decades ago to figure out if this true—it could be it used to be that 40% of kids didn't believe in it.

Well, in my (Gen-X) high school history classes, we only got to WWI (and just after like the 1920's - 30's). I always thought that there is this weird assumption that things that happened in the teachers' lifetime or just previous are "already known" or that the culture will just implant that knowledge somehow.

Same here (also Gen-X). Here in Canada I never learned about WWII in school. I barely remember learning about WWI, and that was usually just around Remembrance Day (celebrated on the anniversary of the Versailles Treaty).

We learned a lot about early Canadian settlement and relations between Europeans and First Nations. By the time I found myself in high school we only needed to take a certain amount of "social studies" credits and, while history was included in that category, there were options that were not specific to history. My experiences learning about Canadian settlement had been so dry and boring that I had made up my mind that I didn't like history at all and so I made every choice in high school to opt out of having to take history classes. In other words, WWI and WWII, if they were taught at all were "optional."

If you'd like to learn about WW2, I cannot over recommend this YT channel. Fantastic quality and production.

https://youtube.com/@WorldWarTwo

Once all the Germans were warlike, and mean
but that couldn't happen again.
We taught them a lesson in 1918,

and they've hardly bothered us since then!

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