Things overheard in the hairdressers. Couldn’t believe my ears this afternoon.

[ChocolateDoll]

Sat with dye on my hair listening to this conversation taking place next to me. Didn’t know whether to laugh or cry

HAIRDRESSER: What you going to do on your holidays, then?

CLIENT: Well, we’re planning to visit Auschwitz.

HAIRDRESSER: Oh, right. What you gonna do there then? Just chill out for a bit?

CLIENT: Umm...well uhhh....it’s a concentration camp, you know?

HAIRDRESSER: oh right....sorry.....thought it was like a resort or something.

This isn’t about school.

People are divided into two categories : those who have their brains open and those who don’t.

It also has nothing to do with snobbery. Laziness? Possibly. Some people are just not thinky enough.

My 2 eldest have read ‘The boy in the striped pyjamas’ at primary school. This was around the age of 9 for both.

Ds is now 15, dd1 11 so not long ago at all. I also knew about WW1 & WW2 before I left primary school and I’m 34!

We moved to Australia and Ds1 is 15 and in Y10 doing extra history subject, so he has double history if you want.
They do historical topics, not historical facts, so for WWII it will be prisoners of war, but not how Hitler got to power in the first place.
They went from Ancient greek to Middle Ages society skipping completely the Roman Empire which makes no sense as how can you understand the rise of the Church without the Fall of the Roman Empire .

They teach bits and bites, no logical order.
I show my sons movies, documentaries, give them books. DS1 is currently reading the Kindly Ones. When he was younger, around 12, I gave him the fall of the giant, as it was a soft introduction to historical fiction. I can't stand young adult crap books. There are great books set in specific historical times that can catch a teen's interest. Michener, roots, .....

DS2 is in Y6. He wouldn't know anything about the birth of writing and therefor history, the Sumerians, or even the Homo Erectus, homo sapiens, the fire, how we became the dominant species, if it wasn;t for books provided at home.

And talking about Geography, the school covers topics such as globalisation, feeding the population, water issues, not countries, capitals, mountains and rivers.

So I think parents need to step in and fill the many holes. Which is not always easy because you compete with Netflix or the PS4.

For all of you, there is an animation movie about Anne Franck. I showed it to my kids when the youngest was 6. There is no scary part, it finishes with the van she is in driving away and birds flying.
It is called Anne no Nikki.

And of course, there are a fair amount of documentaries on Netflix. Just type History in the search box.

My father fought in the war (Airborne Signals), so I knew about it from an early age.

I learnt about the Holocaust and WW2 in my Welsh primary, and covered it in detail at my secondary. We also did the Russian and Chinese Revolutions, Cuba, creation of NATO etc. There was a fair amount of Welsh and British history, with a lot of time spent on how Britain developed as a country, and not just kings and queens. I'm 53. It was a very good school, and had been the County Grammar. The History HOD was a real enthusiast, and very politically active (formerly a Communist), so he encouraged debate.

It's very striking (and worrying!) how different educational experiences have been.

Sorry, did;t mean to sound petulant. Australian curriculum is just driving me nuts compared to the French one I did decades ago.
This topic just enrages me.

I didn't know about the Holocaust until I was at uni and my friend visited Auschwitz. She was telling me about it when she got back and I had no idea what she was talking about and could not begin to comprehend it when she patiently explained it to me. I knew a lot about WW2 from my DF but it was very much about the planes, evacuation and air raids.
It wasn't my fault it wasn't in my radar, neither is it the hairdressers.

You should mention Stalin, estimates between 3-60 million killed by him. It’ll blow her mind!

Re Holocaust deniers, there seems to be a large cohort of Americans who deny it ever happened. God knows what they say when confronted with pictures and contemporary sources!

Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is the standard film to show young teens the story, but it just annoys me that it’s all about the one German child being ‘accidentally’ gassed, yes, tragic and awful, but only an illustration to convey how millions were murdered.

There are so many programmes about the death camps on various TV channels it sometimes seems to be the aspect of WW2 which is remembered more than any other, so in that regard I am surprised by what the OP overheard. The quality of such programmes is not always good - a historian friend of mine calls it "Hitler porn".

But I agree there is in general a lack of a sense of history. I am always astounded at people's inability to understand now different lives were in another time/place. I remember speaking to a couple of 20 year old women before a general election who were completely apathetic about voting - I pointed out that 100 years earlier women had chained themselves to railings & suffered imprisonment/force feeding to win this right and they just looked at me blankly

I agree completely MrBat . It is a shocking sanitisation and distortion of the reality of the Holocaust.

In a way it's a luxury to have not heard of Aushwitz. I'm Jewish and can't imagine not knowing - it's important and personal.

Ahem Auschwitz

Another example of how people can lack any sense of things being different in another time & place - I was describing my MIL's upbringing in rural Malaysia in the 1930s and how poor her family was after her father was taken away by the Japanese during WW2. The woman I was talking to replied, "surely they could have applied for benefits?" She didn't even have the excuse of being very young - she was in her 40s!

I find as I get older my interest in history increases because the process of ageing makes you more & more aware of your very small place in a much larger picture

I visited Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau this summer. It's actually basically this pretty village in the middle of very scenic nowhere, with a ruddy great death camp plonked down on top of it. Fields of grass, lovely elms, you could (if very oblivious) actually have a nice holiday there chilling in the countryside. Even the buildings Auschwitz was housed in are pretty red brick, ever so normal looking. Till you look inside obviously.

Actually I saw a photo a couple weeks ago of a group of merry German Jews in I think the 1920s, heading off on their summer hols. Destination Auschwitz.

Infinitevariety - I've mentioned this on here before I think.

When I first met my exh he "didn't do politics - it's boring" - one reason I found this utterly shocking? He was in the army!

He had no comprehension that "boring politics" directly affected where he was sent on deployment! Let alone the fact that his entire job existed because of "boring politics".

Over time I got him to read newspapers (pre-Internet when we first met), watch the news and then on to history and reading about both politics and politicians (eg he thought Churchill was a labour man! That this was why he was so popular!) prior to meeting me he'd never even voted. When I met his parents I was even more shocked, because they are politically engaged well informed people - his father had been a shop steward ffs!

Anyway gradually he "got it" - we didn't always agree - the first time he voted was in the 97 election, and he voted for Blair, but at least he was voting, he was watching the news even watching things like question time with me whereas previously he'd gone off playing computer games when I was watching such programmes.

The most profound thing though was we watched a documentary about how poorly working class soldiers who fought in wwI were treated upon their return home. He was genuinely shaken by it, he'd had no idea. The injustice really got to him. From that point he not only took an interest himself he became somewhat evangelical in making sure the younger soldiers he worked with informed themselves and were aware of how "boring politics" affected them.

I later learned he'd been turned off politics at school as history and other related subjects were taught to him in a very dry way that he struggled to remember so often failed tests and exams in these subjects. He went to boarding school (his dad was army initially too) so his parents didn't have as much influence.

Whereas I'd been taught history, Geography, current affairs etc by passionate teachers, both at school and at home. One of my most transformative experiences was being taught the history of the Irish question by an Irish man! There were certain things he had to say things like "in an exam this is seen in the U.K. As the correct version" while telling us the other side of things - Irish history and in particular the Irish question is taught in an appallingly biased way in the uk, particularly in England (I haven't experienced Welsh education but have experienced both English and scots. I'm also a Scot of Irish descent and Irish Catholic descent at that so my parents would correct some misconceptions too).

It does affect people's lives - I'd probably not be scots if it weren't for English/British actions in Ireland.

We were talking at work about Auschwitz and a friend had never heard of it. Well, he had, but didn't think it was real (not i the way that some people deny the existence but in that he would it was a fictional novel) He also thought the Holocaust was something different and also fictional.

Same friend thought that Charles Dickens and Shakespeare were the same person.

do we really expect an 18 year old to have watched Schindlers List or The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (etc)?

Boy In The Striped Pyjamas is shown in year 8 here (so that's age 12-13) - I'm in the UK and ds1 did it a couple of years ago.

Yes Graphista the American novelist William Faulkner famously said:
"The past isn't dead. It isn't even past."
History is around us everywhere and in everything

My DS 12 watched 'The Stanford Prison experiment' earlier today about the classic psychology experiment in the 70's, after my trying to explain it to him, which I think is a really good way of trying to understand how the attrocities of the Holocaust could have come about and indeed similar atrocities elsewhere.
I really hope they show this film as part of the curriculum esp as mentioned earlier someones DC watched 'Schindlers List' as part of their curriculum.
I read 'Schindlers Ark' the book of the film at School as part of my curriculum and it had a profound affect on me.

I think an earlier poster alluded to the problem being that in this internet age youngsters can be watching a screen all day but not actually learning anything, as they can pick and choose exactly what to watch.

Contrast that to my upbringing in the 60's when there was only 2 TV channels. However, on one of these TV channels was a fantastic programme called "All Our Yesterdays" which was shown on a Monday at 7pm, just before "Coronation Street". The concept of this programme was that it showed Newsreel clips from what had happened 25 years previously that corresponding week. I must have started watching that in 1963, so my weekly education started in 1938, and over the next 10 or so years I learnt all about WW2, and also got extra snippets from both my parents, who obviously had lived through that period.

I also did further "research" as an avid maker of Airfix models (plastic aircraft construction kits) and learnt a surprising amount of information from the brief histories included in every model. Even further info was gained by reading (as a 7 yo, up until my early teens) small A5 sized graphic picture story books about WW2 (I suppose a similar modern equivalent to Manga books). These were often fictional stories, but about factual battles in WW2.

These kind of things lead me on to read further during my whole life-and have now got hundreds of Factual books about WW2, together with many novels depicting historical incidents from the period.

I'm not sure what point I am trying to make, but people saying you can't learn anything from very poorly researched films such as "Dunkirk" and stories such as "The Boy in the striped Pyjamas"I think they are wrong, as I now have a pretty strong knowledge of the whole aspect of WW2, and that started from Airfix models and comic books.

was in a queue and the girls behind me were chatting about Downs Syndrome. One of them said "Do they have black Downies , or are they all white.

Aside from the extremely offensive language the question isn't a bad one is it? Children with Downs are pretty much always represented by white children so it's not hard to see why someone might ask.

To be fair, it's a pretty strange holiday destination, so the hairdresser probably didn't process it. She was probably only half listening anyway, as she was working.

I just checked and my DC know about Auschwitz and they didn't even grow up in Europe. I think most people know about it and not necessarily because they learnt it at school.

Well, from my Googling the consensus seems to be that while there were some inaccuracies in the film Dunkirk, that overall it was a good representation of the events. 🤷‍♀️

Loads of people thought the movie Titanic was fiction and were shocked to find out it really happened.

My nephew (24) and I were discussing whether and how to start prepping for Brexit the other week. After we had finished he went to see friends a couple in their late 20's with children and told them what we had been talking about, their reply was "whats Brexit?"

My gob is still smacked!

There's a really nasty sneering tone to this. Why is it ok to crow over other people not having knowledge of certain things?
When people on here rudely comment on spelling for example they Are usually called out on it. Why does the same level of respect apply here. It's all very ' let's laugh at the poor dumb hairdresser '
Maybe she didn't know, maybe she wasn't paying a blind bit of attention. Who knows.

Oh and I teach history.