If Millennials Are So ‘Ignorant’ About the Holocaust, Whose Fault Is That?
Because, in case you missed the memo, Gen Y doesn’t write a majority of the educational curriculum
Those of you who’ve read my work before already know what low tolerance I have for the anti-youth ageism that’s regularly exhibited by the women on ABC’s The View.
Whoopi Goldberg — whom I normally love hearing from, and usually find myself agreeing with — loses me when she abnormally fixates her ire on U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In Goldberg’s view, she doesn’t feel that Ocasio-Cortez expresses enough gratitude and respect for the older women “whose shoulders she [AOC] stands on.”
I disagree with a lot of AOC’s political positions; but, despite that, I find Goldberg’s gaslighting of Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez to be gratuitous.
Sunny Hostin has openly disagreed with Goldberg regarding Goldberg’s animosity toward AOC. Yet, Hostin herself (a neofeminist GenXer) has pitifully succumbed to her own superiority complex (in terms of ageism) by subscribing to what I refer to as “The ‘Living in His Mama’s Basement’ Fallacy.”
In other words: any male adult who still resides with his family, even after he has earned a college degree, is probably a moocher and slacker who will never become a good husband.
Joy Behar, on the other hand, can’t even tell apart the differences between Xers, Millennials, Zoomers, or Alphas. We’re apparently all young whippersnappers, to her. So she just generically calls us “millennials.”
And let’s not even get into former cohost Meghan McCain, who spent every other week bashing Generation Y (which she is a part of) in a self-loathing display of internalized ageism.
Behar and Goldberg, on one occasion, seemed to be citing the September 2020 survey findings reported on by Kit Ramgopal of NBC News. According to Ramgopal’s research, a 50-state survey of Millennials and Zoomers showed that between 50%-60% of the respondents had absorbed inaccurate info about the Holocaust.
In fact, between 10% to 20% of Gen Y and Gen Z respondents combined didn’t even know what the Holocaust itself was.
However, Ramgopal identifies multiple contributing factors. First, localized education is key to this disparity. With local school boards governing the curriculums of individual school districts, kids who emerge from better-funded school districts will possess superior knowledge.
But, more significantly, eyewitness testimony is paramount to understanding the Holocaust. Its survivors are dying out due to the natural human aging process. Thus, so are their personal narratives. Ramgopal finds that many school districts are scrambling to digitize those firsthand accounts so they won’t be permanently lost once the actual Holocaust survivors themselves are completely extinct.
And who runs these school boards?
Generally, not Millennials and Zoomers! That’s for damn sure!
Gen Y (and, to a slightly lesser extent, Gen Z and Gen AA) seems to get disproportionately blamed for every social ill that presently exists.
My plea to everyone who loves jumping on the bandwagon of blaming social problems on so-called “millennials” (translation: ALL young people, across the board) — you may benefit from checking out Anne Helen Petersen’s 2020 book, Can’t Even: How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation. Through extensive research, Petersen chronicles a myriad of ways in which society loves to scapegoat Gen Y for problems created by older generations.
And then, as I wrote about in the fourth and final installment of my “Confessions of a Gen Y Kid” series — the 1999 Columbine massacre at the hands of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris gave you a convenient excuse to paint us as manic caricatures.
Beyond social studies curriculums: CNBC journalist Helen Zhao analyzes studies and surveys that show how few Millennials had received financial literacy education in middle school or high school.
Now, especially in the aftermath of Covid-interrupted remote learning, schools are scrambling to implement those types of courses for Zoomers. Presumably, the idea is to have such learning tools solidly in place by the time Alphas (and the future generations who succeed them) reach high school.
Zhao also points out how poverty tends to be generational. This means that, as the wealth gap widens over time, access to educational resources has been increasingly spread thinner with each passing decade.
Finally, as summarized by Annie Holmquist of Intellectual Takeout, the U.S. continues to languish when comparing education on a global scale. American Millennials are being outperformed by international peers in virtually every category.
A big part of this, she theorizes, is because quantity over quality has been prioritized as American schools cycled through Gen X, Gen Y, Gen Z — and, now, Gen AA. She concludes that academics needed to be much more rigorous during the late-90s and the early-to-mid-aughts, if there was any hope of reversing this trend.
So what can be done about these bleak realities?
First, let’s stop tarnishing my generation (Gen Y) as “hopeless” and “ungrateful.”
The Millennial Generation could only have been as good as the authority figures who shepherded our K-12 education. By and large, those teachers were GI-Gens, Traditionalists, Baby Boomers, and some Xers.
For Zoomers and Alphas who enter adulthood with noticeable crevices in their education (based on the limitations of pandemic-induced remote learning), there are going to need to be programs available to fill in those gaps. Some of these tutorials might be funded by our federal government. Others could be provided by credentialed entities from the private sector.
Most of the delivery will probably be online.
But for Millennials — whom the media and political gatekeepers appear to be immortalizing as the eternal “redheaded stepchildren” of the generational spectrum — some outside-of-the-box solutions will need to be found.
I wish I had a clearer blueprint of what those are.
It may need to start with us, as Millennials, no longer being shy or ashamed when it comes to “taking up space.”
Us “children of the 80s, 90s, and early-aughts” should share our oral histories. They will be diverse based on our birth year, our aptitude, our socioeconomics, our racial and/or ethnic heritage, and our gendered experiences.
I’ve already begun to do this.
Whether it was sexual harassment…
Or “image-policing”…
Or our student debt…
Or the glorification of athletics in our lives…
Or the rampant groupthink across our institutions…
Or the Darwinian attitudes you imprinted on us…
Let us tell our stories. Give us the respect of hearing our childhood, adolescent, and young adult perspectives, in retrospect. Allow us the same dignity that you already give to war veterans, politicians, and frontline workers over the age of 50.
Believe us.
Don’t expect us to educate ourselves…and then complain about how we failed to allow ourselves to be properly educated.
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