history is so unimportant. just bunk written by the victors.

Lenin? He was in The Beatles, right?

McManus_brothers: Lenin? He was in The Beatles, right?

I am the Walrus?

Er.... Mao TseWho??

/subbie failed history, obviously

Mao was never mentioned, or if he was mentioned, only in passing, in my high school and college history classes.

RealFarknMcCoy2: Er.... Mao TseWho??
/subbie failed history, obviously

毛泽东

My wife has trouble remembering what order the American Civil War, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War belong in. And she's in her mid-30s now. In all those years, those major historical events haven't come up in conversation and/or the newspapers often enough for her to bother remembering even approximate dates for them.

Just sayin' there's no reason to restrict the polls to teenagers.

andrew131: RealFarknMcCoy2: Er.... Mao TseWho??
/subbie failed history, obviously

毛泽东

Hint: Ze vs Tse

Danarchy84: I am the Walrus?

KOO KOO KOOCHOO!!

I think Soviet communism made up 1 chapter of my HS history book, and our teacher had us only read certain pages.

You know what other Europeans sucked in 20th Century history?

blazemongr: My wife has trouble remembering what order the American Civil War, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War belong in. And she's in her mid-30s now. In all those years, those major historical events haven't come up in conversation and/or the newspapers often enough for her to bother remembering even approximate dates for them.

Just sayin' there's no reason to restrict the polls to teenagers.

Considering our President's Press Secretary doesn't know the difference between the Bay of Pigs incident and the Cuban Missile Crisis, your wife is in good company.

If only there was some channel people could watch on their TV to learn about history.

Bucky Katt: history is so unimportant. just bunk written by the victors.

Because knowing where you came from, and learning from past mistakes, is irrelevant based on the assumption of gaps and issues of perspective.

Well, consider the mindset of this year's average college freshman (new window):


What Berlin wall?

Humvees, minus the artillery, have always been available to the public.

Rush Limbaugh and the "Dittoheads" have always been lambasting liberals.

They never "rolled down" a car window.

They may confuse the Keating Five with a rock group.

They have grown up with bottled water.

General Motors has always been working on an electric car.

Nelson Mandela has always been free and a force in South Africa.

Pete Rose has never played baseball.

Rap music has always been mainstream.

Religious leaders have always been telling politicians what to do, or else!

"Off the hook" has never had anything to do with a telephone.

Music has always been "unplugged."

Russia has always had a multi-party political system.

Women have always been police chiefs in major cities.

They were born the year Harvard Law Review Editor Barack Obama announced he might run for office some day.

The NBA season has always gone on and on and on and on.

Classmates could include Michelle Wie, Jordin Sparks, and Bart Simpson.

Half of them may have been members of the Baby-sitters Club.

Eastern Airlines has never "earned their wings" in their lifetime.

No one has ever been able to sit down comfortably to a meal of "liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti."

Wal-Mart has always been a larger retailer than Sears and has always employed more workers than GM.

Being "lame" has to do with being dumb or inarticulate, not disabled.

Wolf Blitzer has always been serving up the news on CNN.

Katie Couric has always had screen cred.

Al Gore has always been running for president or thinking about it.

They never found a prize in a Coca-Cola "MagiCan."

They were too young to understand Judas Priest's subliminal messages.

When all else fails, the Prozac defense has always been a possibility.

Multigrain chips have always provided healthful junk food.

They grew up in Wayne's World.

U2 has always been more than a spy plane.

They were introduced to Jack Nicholson as "The Joker."

Stadiums, rock tours and sporting events have always had corporate names.

American rock groups have always appeared in Moscow.

Commercial product placements have been the norm in films and on TV.

On Parents' Day on campus, their folks could be mixing it up with Lisa Bonet and Lenny Kravitz with daughter Zöe, or Kathie Lee and Frank Gifford with son Cody.

Fox has always been a major network.

They drove their parents crazy with the Beavis and Butt-Head laugh.

The "Blue Man Group" has always been everywhere.

Women's studies majors have always been offered on campus.

Being a latchkey kid has never been a big deal.

Thanks to MySpace and Facebook, autobiography can happen in real time.

They learned about JFK from Oliver Stone and Malcolm X from Spike Lee.

Most phone calls have never been private.

High definition television has always been available.

Microbreweries have always been ubiquitous.

Virtual reality has always been available when the real thing failed.

Smoking has never been allowed in public spaces in France.

China has always been more interested in making money than in reeducation.

Time has always worked with Warner.

Tiananmen Square is a 2008 Olympics venue, not the scene of a massacre.

The purchase of ivory has always been banned.

MTV has never featured music videos.

The space program has never really caught their attention except in disasters.

Jerry Springer has always been lowering the level of discourse on TV.

They get much more information from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert than from the newspaper.

They're always texting 1 n other.

They will encounter roughly equal numbers of female and male professors in the classroom.

They never saw Johnny Carson live on television.

They have no idea who Rusty Jones was or why he said "goodbye to rusty cars."

Avatars have nothing to do with Hindu deities.

Chavez has nothing to do with iceberg lettuce and everything to do with oil.

Illinois has been trying to ban smoking since the year they were born.

The World Wide Web has been an online tool since they were born.

Chronic fatigue syndrome has always been debilitating and controversial.

Burma has always been Myanmar.

Dilbert has always been ridiculing cubicle culture.

Food packaging has always included nutritional labeling.

Danarchy84: I am the Walrus?




Shut the fark up, Donny! V.I. Lenin. Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov!

TFA: "The poll also revealed that more than a third of the students believe communism has improved the lives of people in some parts of the world."

It sounds like the article suggests that kids thinking this way is a problem, and that their understanding is incorrect. Is it? There are plenty of examples where strict control of the means of production have helped countries develop in the short and medium terms, such as Cuba, Venezuela, etc. Debate the long term consequences of these policies all you like, but it's certainly possible to improve life under such circumstances.

Am I reading this wrong?

Anagrammer WIN

Anagrammer

God, I'm 22 and I feel old. Get off my damn lawn, punks.

blazemongr: My wife has trouble remembering what order the American Civil War, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War belong in. And she's in her mid-30s now. In all those years, those major historical events haven't come up in conversation and/or the newspapers often enough for her to bother remembering even approximate dates for them.

Just sayin' there's no reason to restrict the polls to teenagers.

Please don't take this the wrong way. I'm sure she's otherwise intelligent and a great person, but I could never be close to someone to whom those issues meant nothing. I speak with people on occasion who don't know the "enemy" of our Revolution, who think Castro is a Mexican, or that Hitler was a communist and it enrages me to a point that is beyond words.

It's not just the ignorance of an issue. I'm certainly not a genius. The problem occurs when they don't even care.

I totally want a cat named Chairman Meow.

Or if there were an equally funny dog name like that, I'd take that too. I'm not a cat person.

i couldn't resist

/shiat im in this class. what a bunch off farking morans

FTA: The poll also revealed that more than a third of the students believe communism has improved the lives of people in some parts of the world.

Well that isn't really a yes/no issue. It did bring a lot of Russian money/infrastructure/etc to less developed countries to win them over to their side. Caused a lot of other shiat in the process, but it did have some positive effects, just like Russian industrialization under Stalin, as horrible as much of it was.

Anyway, there are stupid people all over the world. Shocking.

McManus_brothers you feel old , try having to explain who the band Queen were to a 19 yr old

sombreradoraloca: I totally want a cat named Chairman Meow.

Or if there were an equally funny dog name like that, I'd take that too. I'm not a cat person.

Mao Zedog??


/does it work??

But they are teh l33t at 18th and 17th century history...

Anagrammer

Eastern Airlines - now there's something I haven't thought about in years! Thanks for the memory blast.

/liked flying Eastern back in the day
//guess i was alone in that

unyon: TFA: "The poll also revealed that more than a third of the students believe communism has improved the lives of people in some parts of the world."

It sounds like the article suggests that kids thinking this way is a problem, and that their understanding is incorrect. Is it? There are plenty of examples where strict control of the means of production have helped countries develop in the short and medium terms, such as Cuba, Venezuela, etc. Debate the long term consequences of these policies all you like, but it's certainly possible to improve life under such circumstances.

Am I reading this wrong?

It really all depends on what you mean by "communism." Without defining the word, saying what 'it' has done is completely meaningless. I mean, do you mean classic Marxism? Marxism-Leninism? Stalinism? I mean, if you want to be technical, there has never been a communist country in the world (in the sense that Marx theorized).

RealFarknMcCoy2: Er.... Mao TseWho??

/subbie failed history, obviously

Subby didn't fail history. You are stuck in 1978.

Old and busted: Wade-Giles. New hotness: Pinyin.

Yeah, it's Mao Zedong, now.

NewportBarGuy: Danarchy84: I am the Walrus?

Shut the fark up, Donny! V.I. Lenin. Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov!

YOU'RE OUT OF YOUR ELEMENT.

Anagrammer: Well, consider the mindset of this year's average college freshman (new window)

Those are funny.

/born in '89

cemsity: sombreradoraloca: I totally want a cat named Chairman Meow.

Or if there were an equally funny dog name like that, I'd take that too. I'm not a cat person.

Mao Zedog??


/does it work??

It's so similar. I wanted like... "Imelda Barkos" or something.

/OMGZ0RS YOU'VE INSPIRED ME

sombreradoraloca: I totally want a cat named Chairman Meow.

I don't know how to tell you this Sean, but Chairman Meow was actually Chairwoman Meow.

Bucky Katt: history is so unimportant. just bunk written by the victors.

The losers were the ones who refused to read history.

That students don't know about the evils of various left wing governments around the world doesn't surprise me.

randomjsa: That students don't know about the evils of various left wing governments around the world doesn't surprise me.

I lol'd.

Bucky Katt: history is so unimportant. just bunk written by the victors.

Thank you for that null hypothesis.

randomjsa: That students don't know about the evils of various left wing governments around the world doesn't surprise me.

Beaten to the punch as I tried to figure out a witty way to express the above sentiment.

sombreradoraloca: I totally want a cat named Chairman Meow.

Or if there were an equally funny dog name like that, I'd take that too. I'm not a cat person.

Dog Xiaoping?

randomjsa: That students don't know about the evils of various left wing governments around the world doesn't surprise me.

Well, since ALL of our public school teachers are decidedly leftwingers, why would they want to go off on some tangent about the horrors of commie governments? In high school we got to spend an entire week agonizing over what the Nazis did. Not even one minute of time was given to the atrocites committed by Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, ...or even any other right-wing government.

Sometimes even the people who lived through history don't know much about it. A history-buff friend of mine once met an old-timer who had served on a cruiser in WWII. Apparently his duty station was deep in the bowels of the ship, and it wasn't until decades later that he learned he had been in the midst of some of the greatest naval battles of the twentieth century.



/Pol Pet?
//Josef Pawin'?

My degree is in history, so I'm really getting a kick out of some of these replies. The thing is there is so much history, that it is hard to determine what is appropriate in a curriculum. Naturally, there'll be a focus on your own country's history. But what do you cover beyond that? I'm in New Zealand. We didn't cover the American Revolution or Civil War in my history classes at high school - but we did cover Britain under the Tudors and the Stuarts the English Civil War and the Interregnum because it continues to have constitutional ramifications today.

To be honest, most of my core knowledge of twentieth century history came from documentaries such as The People's Century - although I covered WWI, WWII and the Cold War at school (I finished high school in 1996), it was always with a focus on New Zealand's experience.

Mousy Tongue?

He_Hate_Me: sombreradoraloca: I totally want a cat named Chairman Meow.

Or if there were an equally funny dog name like that, I'd take that too. I'm not a cat person.

Dog Xiaoping?

My fifth grade teacher was... well, ...and extreme leftwinger, looking back I know this, and she had mice, and hamsters, guinea pigs, and whatnot in the class. One of the mice was named "Mousy Tongue" Today, I get it. Mao-Tse-Tung.

JQPublic: Well, since ALL of our public school teachers are decidedly leftwingers, why would they want to go off on some tangent about the horrors of commie governments? In high school we got to spend an entire week agonizing over what the Nazis did. Not even one minute of time was given to the atrocites committed by Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, ...or even any other right-wing government.

As I mentioned, I have experience of students having communism somehow warped into Hitler and National Socialism (the name being another issue entirely).

Poor teaching, lack of funding, and reactionary parents ensured that HALF my senior Government class were convinced of Adolf's "liberalism" and Marxist ideals. It took long, slow, and careful explanation by the instructor at hand to explain this wasn't so.

I was 17 at that time, and attempted to reassure myself that folks would grow out of their stupidity and naive worldview. 22 and still chugging forward.

randomjsa: That students don't know about the evils of various left wing governments around the world doesn't surprise me.

Do you know who actually invaded Cambodia and drove the Khmer Rouge from power - and had to fight off the Chinese because of it?

/hint: it sounds like "Nietvam".

I like how they always paint it as if it is the students who are complete dumbasses. Maybe it's because the teachers fark their students more than they bother to actually teach anything useful? My history classes in High School were jokes, as were all the other classes. Hell, my college classes are just as bad. Maybe if the "curriculum" wasn't total shiat and we were actually taught some details, instead of just stuffing decades of history into 1 paragraph, we wouldn't all be such stupid shiats.

JQPublic: randomjsa: That students don't know about the evils of various left wing governments around the world doesn't surprise me.

Well, since ALL of our public school teachers are decidedly leftwingers, why would they want to go off on some tangent about the horrors of commie governments? In high school we got to spend an entire week agonizing over what the Nazis did. Not even one minute of time was given to the atrocites committed by Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, ...or even any other right-wing government.

You're generalizing. Most are left, but not all; even the most left-wing history teachers I've ever had covered both sides and most certainly covered communism as thoroughly as there was time for (1600-1930ish high school survey courses can't cover a whole lot in depth).

McManus_brothers: Danarchy84: I am the Walrus?

KOO KOO KOOCHOO!!

The lyrics to "I am the Walrus" are "goo goo g' joob"

"Koo koo ka choo" comes from Mrs. Robinson:

"Koo koo ka choo Mrs. Robinson,
Jesus loves you more than you will know"

/one of my really really lame pet peeves
//But if you go carryin' pictures of Chairman Mao
You ain't goin' to make it with anyone anyhow