WW II History: Our Kids/Grandkids Being Cheated?

[Wadcutter]

Originally Posted by Bob Womack

I cannot speak to Canada but I can speak to the U.S. While the actions of Middle-Eastern Muslim extremist terrorists don't directly impinge on my freedoms, the result of their actions and the actions they inspire and coordinate greatly effect my freedoms. How?

When there is a threat to security, many citizens demand strictures that bind our freedoms. They think they can trade freedom for security.

As a result, in many places it is no longer possible to simply park your car and walk into a building. Barricades now block the entrances to many buildings and nearby parking has been closed.

Pocketknives are tools that are traditional in my region of the U.S. but they are banned in most theater venues and aboard many forms of transportation.

Every day we hear of new laws being proposed that restrict the core values our nation was founded upon. Freedom of speech is threatened by surveillance. Freedom of assembly is threatened by the threat of opportunistic mass murders inspired or coordinated by Middle-Eastern Muslim extremist terrorists. Our culture is changed.

The strategy of threatening the originators of this violence where they live in order to make them too busy trying to stay alive to export their violence to our country makes a lot of sense. If you want to see what happens when their existence isn't threatened, look to Paris, Nice, Germany, London, L.A., Orlando, and more.

So no, I don't see terrorists hitting Canada quite yet. But as an open Western society, you could easily be next. And your laws are probably changing even as you speak to trade freedom for security.

Bob

Well stated Bob. Many times you post what I've been thinking, but I'm not articulate enough to get it into a post. I particularly like your statement "If you want to see what happens when their existence isn't threatened, look to Paris, Nice, Germany, London, L.A., Orlando and more." Right on.

[VTexan]

...people are elected to oversee the process of writing school books. Because of that the process has become highly politicized and the history quite inaccurate. Surgery should be left to surgeons. History should be left to the historians.

Worse for the rest of you is the fact that since Texas has such a huge population of students, many of the school books written and sanctioned here get bought by the smaller states.

Please accept my apologies in advance for Texas's part in dumbing down future generations...

[Wadcutter]

Originally Posted by flaggerphil

The problem, I think, is that WW-II ended 70 years ago. That's getting out there. When I was a kid in the '50s and '60s it was still fresh in people's minds.

It kind of reminds me of how WW-I was thought of back then...and that war's been all but forgotten now.

I was in Vietnam in '72 and '73 and kids today think of that as ancient history.

And when you have a current war that's been going on for around 15 years...well...it's hard to teach kids that something that started in 1939 is relevant. Even though it is.

Good points there Phil. I fought in Vietnam as well, and I tend to get annoyed when I talk to people who really don't know much about what happened there and why. I lost several good friends over there and I tend to take it personal. But When I pull back and collect myself, I try to tell myself "Dude, Vietnam ended almost FIFTY YEARS ago!" Not that that makes it any less relevant, but time does have a corrosive effect. It's just the way of the world I guess and WW II certainly isn't immune from it even though the warfare was world wide back then.

[blue]

Originally Posted by Greg Rappleye

There is no doubt that the people of the Soviet Union suffered horribly during the World War II era.
Greg Rappleye

The eye opener for me as a child was hearing John Cleese say (and I paraphrase) "When I first went to America everyone wanted to tell me Polish Jokes. I didn't understand them. To me the Polish people were ridiculously brave individuals who fought with nothing but valor against incredible odds."

That lead directly to me developing an interest in the "real story". Well, as real as you can ever get through readily available published works.

Without John Cleese's offhand comment, I would would have probably never known much more than the standard "Yeah, we rolled in there and saved your Pansy butts!" story americans believed in the forties, fifties, sixties and much of the seventies.

[zabdart]

People who are really interested in the history of World War II ought to read The Lost Peace by Robert Dallek, an examination of how we won the war but failed (sometimes quite miserably) to find the conditions to establish a lasting peace and how those factors led to the Cold War, the Korean War and the First and Second Indochina wars. It's a really fascinating analysis of missteps based on miscalculations. Could we have done any better? Perhaps, but no one is blessed with that kind of foresight. At the time everyone involved was just trying to make the best of what they perceived as a bad situation.

[HHP]

Originally Posted by blue

The eye opener for me as a child was hearing John Cleese say (and I paraphrase) "When I first went to America everyone wanted to tell me Polish Jokes. I didn't understand them. To me the Polish people were ridiculously brave individuals who fought with nothing but valor against incredible odds."

That lead directly to me developing an interest in the "real story". Well, as real as you can ever get through readily available published works.

Without John Cleese's offhand comment, I would would have probably never known much more than the standard "Yeah, we rolled in there and saved your Pansy butts!" story americans believed in the forties, fifties, sixties and much of the seventies.

Well, let's not get carried away. We did roll in and save their butts, pansy or otherwise. Our industrial capacity was unaffected by the war and were the only ones who could do it. And, we did it on two fronts. Lots of countries paid a huge price but none were in a real position to do more than hold the Third Reich and Japan. We were the only ones who could defeat them and we chose to do it.

[Song Writer]

Originally Posted by HHP

Well, let's not get carried away. We did roll in and save their butts, pansy or otherwise. Our industrial capacity was unaffected by the war and were the only ones who could do it. And, we did it on two fronts. Lots of countries paid a huge price but none were in a real position to do more than hold the Third Reich and Japan. We were the only ones who could defeat them and we chose to do it.

Yeah, just minus most of the fighting and most of the dying.

[Pitar]

My association with, and basic knowledge of that short period in history was in large part through the eyes of a military brat. My Pop was a pilot in that period and remained a pilot till he retired from flying altogether. I was born in Landstuhl, West Germany, while he was assigned to post war occupational forces with the 302nd Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron flying the RF-84F Thunderflash at Sembach AB. Here's a model of it I built for him to take to reunions of that squadron, which is no longer represented by a living legacy. He was with a few flying outfits from 1943-1963 so I built examples of the planes they flew as table center-pieces at their reunions.

https://app.box.com/representation/f...2048_jpg/1.jpg

My own interest in military aviation throughout its history from the observation planes in WWI, and on, rounded out my knowledge and appreciation for the technical and operational sides of it.

On the subject of remembrance, it's important to remember that war as it represented every kind of calamity man could possibly have gotten himself into, to learn from, but instead it's being pushed into the ether. I want to think that forgetting it's effects on the world is partly due to a body politic at work to keep all the global egos from retro-blame and the tarnish subsequent generations seem comfortable ascribing to them, and to a larger measure from the dying out of the entire generation that lived it.

I was left all the physical trappings of a pilot-warrior from his cadet graduation ring depicting a P-38 Lightning and all the AAF symbology, through all his flight logs and associated military orders, leather skull cap and O2 mask and goggles, a flight suit, several foot lockers and a wealth of pictures he took as slides. He saved every scrap of paper the military issued to him and even has awards from Pease AFB for completely wiping out New York City on two separate practice nuclear bombing runs while flying B-47s with the 100th Bomb Wing.

What do I do with this legacy when it's my time to check out? Well, I guess I'll arrange to have it sent to a museum that will catalog it for posterity. Perhaps there will be succeeding generations to know of the man I barely knew.

[Glennwillow]

Originally Posted by Song Writer

Yeah, they should teach Americans what happened during WWII: like the fact that at no time did the combined British, Canadian, American, and French forces ever square off against the same number of German division that the Soviets faced in the Eastern Front. That most of the fighting and most of the dying on the Allied side was done by the combined Soviet armies. That American civilian casualties for the entire war were under 2,000, while civilian deaths in the Soviet Union were 12-15 million.

Yes, I'd like to see those facts taught in any American high school, taught right along side Guadalcanal, Midway, El Almein, and Kursk.

In my experience as an American, I was not taught in my history courses that the Soviet military and civilian population absorbed the majority of the deaths of World War II. I have seen numbers varying from 20 million to 28 million deaths. Depending on whose numbers you use, the total death toll from WWII was 40-54 million. The higher numbers of Soviet deaths and total deaths from WWII are more recent.

The USA did help supply a lot of equipment to the Soviets, but it was the toughness of these people to absorb severe punishment and keep on going that allowed them to eventually turn back the German army and defeat them on the Easter Front.

- Glenn

[Glennwillow]

I think that the older folks among us are always worried about what the younger generation are learning and it seems it's never enough. And it never is, even if the education is a superior one.

Education is a lifelong pursuit. The best thing that education can do for a young student is to imprint the hunger for more information. There is always more to learn.

I know that as an engineer that lifelong learning was critically important to me. Now that I have finished my career after 46 years I see that along with every other engineer who survived for that length of time that we had to keep reinventing how we did our jobs. The fundamental equations are still the same, but the tools are so very different and so much more powerful. For much of my career I worked on a drafting table using a slide rule or calculator. It's only been since the early 1990s that we shifted over to computer aided drafting, to powerful spreadsheets, and today to super powerful simulation programs. Any engineer who was not willing to continue to learn the new technologies was left in the dust.

The same is true of all learning. It's up to us to learn and to find ways to satisfy our curiosity. Every great man or woman in history had to do the same thing.

- Glenn

[Wadcutter]

Originally Posted by VTexan

...people are elected to oversee the process of writing school books. Because of that the process has become highly politicized and the history quite inaccurate. Surgery should be left to surgeons. History should be left to the historians.

Worse for the rest of you is the fact that since Texas has such a huge population of students, many of the school books written and sanctioned here get bought by the smaller states.

Please accept my apologies in advance for Texas's part in dumbing down future generations...

Apology accepted.

[Pitar]

Schools and learning institutions do not impart the desire to learn. They never have.

People change and the generations who learned what they learned did so on their own, through their own innate curiosity of their world and how they could fit into it. Educators then, no differently that they do today, merely present the information. It's up to the child to take it from there and teach himself. I would go so far as to accuse the educational system of fooling the world regarding its educators. That's a misnomer. No teaching takes place until the light of understanding glimmers behind a person's eyes, and that moment usually means the person worked to gain that understanding on his own. So, who taught who?

The world of today's youth is one of high-tech, high expectations from them that they do not acquire in primary education. Their view from the bottom is not clear. The industries requiring specific skills sets are not dove-tailing with the current primary educational system. It's completely ludicrous to think a child of the latest generation has been contacted in any manner suitable to his or her possible calling by the industries at large. Moreover, we see more participation from professional sport talent scouts than we do industry. We really have left the kids in the dust as the lure of technological advances outpaced education. What we do have publicly posted on home pages is disparaging commentary of careers one should not seek. Oh, thanks a pant-lode, Chet.

The high tech of our predecessors for entry level positions was commensurate with its concurrent primary education. Those days are so far gone one has to be completely out of touch to draw a comparison to today regarding self-affirmation and the student.

My career field is aircraft maintenance. The US Federal Aviation Administration's Federal Aviation Regulation Part 147, which describes the curriculum to be taught to students of aviation maintenance, is so antiquated that nothing short of a monumental event is needed to even squeak out something hinting at thresholding subjects actually pertinent to today's aviation maintenance requirements. The current system still holds that the days of dope and fabric (World War 1 aircraft, et al) is too important to not teach the basics of. Agreed. Those planes are (thankfully) still flying. But, what about ARINC 429, FADEC systems, stepper motor technologies, linear and rotary variable differential transformer reporting technology that's all been incorporated into most hydraulic and pneumatic systems in the new-gen aircraft? That technology itself is 40+ years old! Where was the aviation school technology architecture those many years ago? Bureaucratically stifled. In the furthest reaches of dusty desks of government workers, who are largely unaccountable for a good day's work, lie the needs for moving the curriculum into Y2K, much less today. So, take that bit of micro-sampling and apply it to today's mass public educational curriculum and find yourself crying inside for your kids. Our predecessors were the dope and fabric generation. Our kids are children of the space age.

I took my kids and nurtured them as much as I could at home, to offset the poor representation of a school system they've been mandated into, and then went the extra mile and got them into my place of business in internships. They did not get paid monetary compensation but they did get the benefit of hands on in a no-nonsense work environment. They learned the value of what a hard day's work means to a company, to the employees and to themselves. Where else is a kid gong to be imbued with that kind of appreciation outside the home? Industry, that's where. But, it isn't communicating and the public school system is not fighting for its charges. Kids, for their part are giving what they're getting and disinterest is the best word I can use to describe what they're being handed by their world.

You can only beat the students and their parents so much, and blame the teachers to a certain extent. Eventually you have to understand it's the system that's failed. If you aren't getting results but the people want to work, change the system. If you aren't getting results from a proven system, change the people. At the educational level it's pretty clear the results are the failing of the system.

[blue]

Originally Posted by HHP

Well, let's not get carried away. We did roll in and save their butts, pansy or otherwise.

Yes I know. My point was that sadly I was led to know that not by the educational system I grew up in, but by the comments of a Python

[ewalling]

Originally Posted by Pitar

Schools and learning institutions do not impart the desire to learn. They never have.

You can only beat the students and their parents so much, and blame the teachers to a certain extent. Eventually you have to understand it's the system that's failed. If you aren't getting results but the people want to work, change the system. If you aren't getting results from a proven system, change the people. At the educational level it's pretty clear the results are the failing of the system.

In all fairness, the idea that learning is far more important a focus of interest than teaching has been familiar with educators for quite some time. In the late 80s and even before, a proportion of educational research, both in the US and Europe, shifted from "What are the best teaching techniques?" to "What are the best learning techniques?" A teacher could dance around at the front of the class being brilliant and wow-look-at-me and Robin-Williams-dead-poets till s/he was blue in the face, but if the student was applying ineffective methods of processing information, the teacher might as well turn on the TV. That was the where some of the thinking began to move in the late 80s.

The problem about that line of thinking is that it doesn't have quite the same accountability as a "teacher-as-god" system. Because if the student fails to acquire the techniques that work for him/her, and there were no universally "good" ones, then who can you blame (if you're into blame) but the student, providing the teacher has exposed the him or her to the possibilities? You also can't blame schools for students not reaching some mandated standard on a test. You can't reward officials and you can't punish them. You can't assess schools, principals, educators and curricula as if they were the people and companies involved in churning out vacuum cleaners in a competitive market.

So, I think it's a bit rough to start blaming schools and learning institutions. I think they've come up with some interesting ideas on education in recent years, but if the guys at the top are under pressure to promise that little Johnny and Jane will nail As and become winners, their hands can get tied when it comes to concentrating on learning in a more meaningful sense.

[Steve DeRosa]

Originally Posted by VTexan

[Here in Texas]...people are elected to oversee the process of writing school books. Because of that the process has become highly politicized and the history quite inaccurate. Surgery should be left to surgeons. History should be left to the historians.

Worse for the rest of you is the fact that since Texas has such a huge population of students, many of the school books written and sanctioned here get bought by the smaller states.

Please accept my apologies in advance for Texas's part in dumbing down future generations...

Here in New York the process isn't much different other than that the books are written and curriculum dictated by quasi-academic think tanks, the most notorious and despised among rank-and-file front-line teachers being the innocuous-sounding, Columbia University-based Teachers' College; and Pearson Publishing, the unabashedly for-(maximum) profit firm at the forefront of (the increasingly-discredited) Common Core. I can't begin to tell you how many times I needed to de-blerk, de-politicize, correct wholesale, translate into concepts and language the average elementary-school student (much less their parents) would have a prayer of understanding, and scrap outright the prescribed curriculum in favor of giving my kids a real education - even if only for one year - all the while cognizant of the need to fly below the radar of "departmental policy." A quote from Alan Singer, published in the Huffington Post, states it thus:

Personally, I do not have confidence in the publishers, politicians, and certainly not in the expert educational consultants. I think the difference makers will have to be teachers. Teachers will be the ones to decide whether...any educational change provides real substance and prepares students not just for college or work but for active participation as fully engaged citizens of a democratic society. (emphasis mine)

In the meantime, let’s hope the protests continue to grow.

By way of further example, our mandated Social Studies text was offered by the publisher in two versions - one for "New York City" and one for the broader market - difference being that the NYC iteration was not only poorer in overall content but contained verifiable errors in the area of civics; when I questioned a sympathetic superior about the changeover to said text, I was informed that the company did it this way because, in its view, "nobody really teaches this stuff anymore" ...

But I did...

Over the last three decades I've watched the "teaching" of American history at the K-12 level shift from analysis of a broad-based, centuries-long timeline of significant events/individuals leading up to the present, in favor of a class-struggle model; gross overemphasis of the post-1960 period and the social upheavals associated therewith; and a tabloid-style, picayune expose' of the personal foibles of major European-American historical figures, rather than their formidable achievements and the indispensable part they continue to play in not only our American system but global history, a century or two or three after their death...

Over the same period I have witnessed an ever-increasing lack of in-depth thinking about, and interest in, what we used to call "current events" when I was in school - this at a time when the technological revolution permits real-time streaming of global events as they happen - and on those occasions when there is some superficial interest, an unsettling tendency to fall in, lemming-like, behind the views and positions of those who scream the loudest...

There was a plaque I saw for sale in a West Virginia store, written in local dialect, which read, "Ya cain't know where yer goin' till ya know where ya been" - a common-folk rendition of the Hegelian principle (oft paraphrased by other philosophers) that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it...

Originally Posted by ewalling

...I think the notion that history is all about studying the past and making sure certain things don't/do happen again would suggest that we should by now have removed most of the glaring repetitions of seeming folly that continue to assail us with such alarming consistency. This, however, is not the case....

- simple reason being, in the words of Ron White, "you can't fix stupid" - nor can any of us change human nature...

Getting back to the OT, our kids - the future citizens of this nation - deserve far better than they're getting under the present system, and they'd better get it soon...

In the meantime, let's hope the protests continue to grow...