@Manderleyagain
think there is a problem in that new technology means young people genuinely have less knowledge of recent history. They're living in a "now" bubble with infinite content.
When I was young, there were 4 TV channels, which often had content repeated from previous decades, and other curated content, which meant that you soaked up culture with historical context.
I was born in the 70s, and WWII seemed like a long way away, but I still had a general picture of what the last 50 years were like from TV (and books). I'm not sure current generations get that so much.
This is a really good point. I'd had similar thoughts about how they live in an a-historical 'now,' bubble and don't actually know that things they think are facts were only invented fairly recently. But I hadn't thought properly about how our childhpods gave us a better grounding in the last few decades. In the 80s I watched a lot of telly that was made in the 60s, and there as always black and white films on, even from the 30s.
Yes, agree absolutely with this - in fact it goes as far as all our built environment. When I was growing up my school had been built in the 1930s, we were taught in wartime prefabs, the doctor’s surgery was in a terraced house, the buses and shops were decades old, people’s houses were decorated in old fashioned ways. My grandparents had a tin in their under-stairs cupboard with their wartime ration books in. Not just in media, but all around you were the traces of the past.
Plus the few ways people got news and information were much more public. My parents near-religiously watched the six and nine o’clock news, and we had to be quiet while it was on. They had the radio on in the mornings to hear the news and today programme. So we were exposed to a lot of current events just by default.
Nowadays lots of kids often go to nurseries, schools etc. in buildings built entirely after 1997. One thing that did happen was a huge rebuilding of the built environment after 2000 during the long construction boom. It’s really great that they have better facilities than I did in my decrepit pre and postwar school buildings. But it means they aren’t any longer living in a world that is physically marked by the past decades of the twentieth century.
Same goes for people’s houses. Current decor trends are often bland and encourage constant redecorating. I can’t say I want to live in an old fashioned house either; but it’s true that you just don’t often see the traces of past styles and lives in people’s houses any more the way you used to. So younger generations are a lot more disconnected from the even recent past than they used to be.
My own students often are hilariously ill-informed about recent history. They regularly have never heard of the Cold War or major historical events after 1945. One of mine recently couldn’t understand why London buildings were all black in photos from the early twentieth century. He had never thought about the fact that coal fires were the main source of heat, or seen historical buildings that hadn’t been stoneblasted to remove all the 19th century soot.