Most of the electorate is CLUELESS about WWII history.. [View All]

Bush's Nazi remarks offer a PERFECT opportunity to tell us what really happened in WWII.

I am 59 years old, and in high school ( the highest education MOST people get) we never even "got to" WWII. Our public school system spends YEARS "schooling" us in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War and WWI, but by the time high school arrives in most of our lives, history is usually a mish-mash of memorizing dates, and little more.. My youngest son graduated in 1997, and what HE learned about WWII, he PAID for in college..The most interesting parts of WWII history, he learned in Italy..(he went to college for a while in Florence)..

With a generation as large as the Boomers, are I am guessing that MOST of us had similar experiences in school. I went to a good school, and yet our textbooks were out of date. With all the funds-cutting since, I cannot help but think schools today are much the same.

We, as a country have always just blundered forward, without much reflection on what came before. Our foreign policy has always been RE-active, instead of pro-active.

Since "feckless-leader" brought up Nazis, appeasement and WWII, maybe NOW is the perfect time to finally catch us up on our own history.

My guess is that most people's knowledge of WWII and the Cold War is what they have pieced together from movies.

I feel personbally lucky, since my junior year history teacher deviated from the "book" and gave us a primer on Viet Nam (he was actually suspended for a week for doing it too).. His brother was IN Viet Nam, and he thought that since so many kids in his class would be drafted, they at least needed to know what was going on. We learned about the French involvement and the history of why we were there..and that pissed off the Kansas Board of Education..bigtime..

How much did YOU learn about WWII in SCHOOL? where did you learn what you know about it?

Where we are NOW, is directly related to where we have been, and the steps we took to get where we are.. The Middle East is a DIRECT result of WWII. We cannot "solve" anything, until we KNOW how we got where we are, who was responsible for what decisions, and how they relate to us TODAY..

We are fighting against people who remember collectively, events that are thousands of years old, and who hold powerful grudges...and we re-invent ourselves every 4 years.. That does not bode well for us..