1 No, no, that was during Korea.  WWII was Popeye.

2 Mickey's just in charge of copyright policy. For atomic energy, you have to talk to (who else?) Pluto.

3

...And Goofy to reign above them all...

C.T.

4 Didn't Scrooge McDuck have something to do with it?

I mean, building Manhattan is a big job, but he's rich enough.

5 That's nothing; I saw an article just in the last week or so where somebody passed around a picture of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima, and almost nobody recognized it... in the DC press room in which they worked.

6 Um, yeah.

7 I didn't know what the Iwo Jima picture was until I was 35, I think. Heck I still don't know if Grant was Union or Confederation (although, I know that Sherman marched to the sea). Still, for an American it's a bit strange not to know. I even suspect that the article may be made up.

8

Pete, unfortunately I find it to be very plausible. The problem here is not inadvertant cluelessness, it's deliberate cluelessness.

There's been a concerted effort by American educators over the last 30 years to try to avoid as much as possible telling their students anything which would make them proud of America and proud to be Americans. Instead, they study all the reasons why America is dirty and grimy and why they should be ashamed to be Americans.

Regarding the Japanese in WWII, students don't learn about the Rape of Nanking. They spend their time studying the American internment camps. As to Iwo? Well, it was a terrific battle that America won. We don't study American victories; they're too likely to make us proud of those American soldiers. Can't have that.

What I just wrote is deliberately a bit of a caricature, but not as much so as you might think. Some schools use "A People's History of the United States" as their text in American history courses, I was appalled to learn. Which could be described as, "American history as Pravda would have written it". Its author, Zinn, was an unapologetic Marxist and his goal with the book was to advance the revolution.

I'm not really surprised that you didn't recognize that picture of Iwo, and I'm not too concerned. I'm sure you do know a hell of a lot (and more than any of us) about the Great Patriotic War -- and rightly so. I'm sure you studied it in school. And I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that relatives of yours died in it. (Especially if you're from Petrograd, as I have a vague memory might be the case.)

What's really sad is that our students don't study our military campaigns any longer. The only thing they learn now is about how America is a monster and a military bully.

9 The American participation in WWII was consistently downplayed in USSR, mostly by playing the numbers card: "Germans put up so and so many divisions at the Eastern Front and that much less at the Western Front, stupid ineffective strategic bombing campaigns, yak yak yak". There was also the a very ghastly angle of "they only lost 365000 people and we lost tens of millions! *CLEARLY* we won the war and they only helped!"

Still, I am beginning to suspect that I might have seen the picture before, but never knew the story of Iwo Jima. A graphic based on it graced the headpage of freebsd.org for a long while.

My paternal grandmother actually spent the blockade in SpB and survived because she worked in NKVD (yep, the Russian Gestapo... AFAIK she didn't actually torture anyone, just pushed papers). NKVD personnel had better bread allowance that supplied enough calories to survive. Her husband, my grandfather, was a POW. Fortunately, it was not known. After the war she used her connections to save him from summary incarceration. POWs were treated as traitors back then.

10

I will agree on the concerted effort to prevent the teaching of actual history in school. Even when I was in school, history courses seemed to be just a random mash of whatever the teacher happened to believe in... one of my teachers taught that the South won the Civil War by assassinating the Union President Abraham Lincoln, and that's the only reason there are such things as state governments today, instead of one big Federal bureaucracy. (Somehow slavery was never mentioned, except as something the North forced on the South before the Revolutionary War.) No doubt the teachers' unions have been busy planting their own seeds on such fertile soil in the decades since.

11 I thank my parents for making the sacrifices necessary to put me into a private school for the last four years of my education.

12 We could not pull it off, so we homeschooled.

13 And she probably got a better education that way, as well as learning to speak Russian.

14 That's rather embarrassing, I'd forgotten already that you had posted on it, too.

I got stuck with public education.  It was the small-town edition, so it was decent and not thoroughly converted into a bastion of indoctrination (like my humanities courses at college were).  What really helped me was the fact that my mother and grandmother are voracious bookworms, and got me to reading at a very early age.  Even then there was (and probably still is) a lot of stuff that I "knew that ain't so"; for example, I learned the standard modern history of the Vietnam War, and didn't learn the *real* timeline or events, especially the 1972-1975 part, until a few years ago, on the Internet.

And that's the thing that might, maybe, save us.  As long as children (or adults) can be convinced to go out and look stuff up online (and not just from their favorite politically-oriented site) for their own curiosity, the truth will out--or, at least, it may have a fighting chance.  While I groan and moan about being sucked into Tropes or "The Other Wiki", I learn a lot from those lost hours.  Heck, just this evening, I burned considerable time stuck on Wikipedia after I came across the entry on Lord Cochrane, who I had never heard of before.

15 I was fortunate to have gone to school in a decent suburban public school system in the late eighties / early nineties.  Some teachers were unabashaedly liberal, while my senior government teacher was a conservative mormon health-food nut, so there was a token balance to the nuttiness.

I don't think that I saw a deliberate effort to downplay American exceptionalness, but more the requirement that certain special interest topics get covered, and anything else had to get crammed in where it would fit: Women's Sufferage, the Civil Rights movement, slavery, the internment camps, the American Indians, Hiroshima, the Holocaust;  all got their preference before anything else.  I do know it's gotten worse since I graduated.  Looking at it from a college graduate military history buff perspective, I could write a curricula covering World War II and how it has influenced the modern era that would be at least a semester's worth of work, all of it important, but modern students will never have that sort of luxury.

I think there is a marked lack of common sense in looking at history where people can't derive lessons from the past even when they know their history.  I remember hearing lefties complain about the unprecedented level of civil rights violations during the G. W. Bush administration; you'd have thought they'd have remembered their own lessons on the internment camps, etc.

16 I can sum up the quality of education in my high school in one short phrase: the Honors Biology teacher was a Creationist.

-j

17 I had a lot of teachers in school who... it's not that they made a special effort to exclude American war history, it's just that they didn't understand it very well, and so they weren't ever really engaged in it. They taught those sections pretty much out of the textbook. I had one World History teacher (a coach, and also one of the best teachers I ever had) who made a spirited attempt at covering military history as well, but there's only so much you can do covering the history of the entire world in a year. Another US history teacher turned her WW2 unit over to a couple of enthusiastic students in her class (which seemed to work pretty well).

Part of it's due to the curriculum. Teachers tend to take a lot of time with the Revolution, expansion and migration, the slavery issue, and social stuff in the early 1900s (women's sufferage, labor, "The Jungle"...) Then the Depression and its alphabet soup of new government agencies. By the time you get to WW2, it's late April and a lot of schools are running out of time; either you give it short shrift so you can at least mention the fifty years since then, or you do a decent WW2 unit and then end up not even getting to Watergate. Bad scheduling, really, more than malice.

18 Seems to me US history really shouldn't be a single year course.  We may be a young nation, but we have enough history to at least fill a two year course.

19 I administered the test and my vaunted homeschooling fell on its face. Upon being shown the image, the subject said that "it's the WWII, but I don't know where or when; I certainly saw it before, but..."

20

Pete, if the subject even got the correct war, that puts him/her in the top 80th percentile of full-grown journalists. Plus props for being willing to admit they weren't sure which theater; a lot of people would have said it was from D-Day and then tried to bombast their way through an excuse when told they're wrong.