I bet everyone reading this knows history

It’s preaching to the choir, but the US ignorance is pathetic

Amid all the talk about opening schools, closing schools or partially opening schools comes a report that among Americans under 40, “over 1 in 10 respondents … did not recall ever having heard the word ‘Holocaust’ before.”

This raises the question: What the devil were the schools doing for the past 30 years before the Coronavirus hit?

How is this even possible? Probably the same way it’s possible for Washington public schools to spend more than $30,000 a year per pupil and still have only 23% of the students test proficient in reading.

The Holocaust survey, as reported by NBC News, also found:

“Sixty-three percent of those (under 40 Americans) surveyed did not know that 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, and over half of those thought the death toll was fewer than 2 million. Over 40,000 concentration camps and ghettos were established during World War II, but nearly half of US respondents could not name a single one.”

It is worth pointing out that the survey was commissioned by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, an organization clearly interested in promoting more education on the evils of the Holocaust.

But even if their figures are off by a factor of two, it is still a stunning indictment of the US education system.

And I work in the US education system.

You see the same shocking figures every year when history and civics survey results are published.

People who read newspapers are not the ones who lack basic knowledge, so it is preaching to the choir to lament it here. But it truly is astonishing.

I could get into reasons, but the editors wouldn’t give me the rest of the entire paper, so I’ll just move along to the next item.

Our friends back East can’t say we never gave them anything: They are getting smoke from our wildfires.

And like everything else, people are divided over the wildfires. People on the left say it is global warming; people on the right say it is forest mismanagement.

It seems perfectly obvious that both are factors, but the partisans can never say that. It is all so tiresome.

I don’t have Netflix, so have no idea if this show is good or bad, but a reader points out that Netflix is running a fourpart series on the space shuttle Challenger disaster.

Since the AV was so instrumental in the shuttle program, involving thousands of residents, you may want to check it out.

That is, if you are not among the thousands of people who have reportedly canceled Netflix over a series, “Cuties,” that critics say promotes child exploitation.

Does it? As I say, I don’t have Netflix. Don’t want it. Don’t want to know.

My college friend Dale Shackleford coaches an American Athletic Union (AAU) under-17 basketball team in Florida.

The team played in a tournament in South Carolina over the weekend and did well but couldn’t play in the finals because the last day of the tournament was canceled.

Hurricane? No. Coronavirus? No. Riots in the streets? No.

Two other teams got into a brawl, or more specifically, the parents of two other teams got into a brawl, and officials called the whole thing off.

So poor Shack and his team went all the way up to South Carolina for nothing.

What else would he expect from the 2020 tournament?