A troubling poll and Holocaust education
Harvard/Harris poll shows startling support among youth for the Oct. 7 terror attack
In a recent recap of news by the Carolina Partnership for Reform, a disturbing set of poll data was highlighted.
The kids love Hamas! That's the takeaway from this month's Harvard/Harris poll. Among 18-24 year olds:
60% think "the Hamas killing of 1,200 Israeli civilians and the kidnapping of another 250 civilians can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians."
50% "support Hamas more than Israel."
Majorities agree that students "should be told they are free to call for the genocide of Jews," and that "calling for the genocide of Jews constitutes harassment." Let that one sink in.
But wait, there's more. A huge majority of Americans -- 65% of all respondents -- said they oppose "the ideology that white people are oppressors and nonwhite people and people of certain groups have been oppressed and as a result should be favored today at universities and for employment."
But not the kids: 79% of them said they support that ideology. And 67% of the kids think "Jews as a class are oppressors." Yes, the same Jews who faced extermination not that long ago. The same Jews who were raped and murdered a couple of months ago. They're the oppressors.
Okay, hear us out here. Maybe we should take a little more seriously the concern that the kids are getting bad information from school, college, and TikTok.
Notably absent from the poll are questions about Iran's involvement with Hamas.
The Harvard/Harris poll also clocked 84% of respondents agreeing the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas was terrorism.
Even 73% of 18-24-year-olds agreed with that. Notice how the agreement percentage increases with age -- i.e. older individuals know their history.
A few slides later, 18-24-year-olds are split in their support for Israel and that of Hamas, an internationally recognized terrorist organization.
Looking at these results and seeing the antisemitic campus protests going on around the country, CPFR is correct; This poll lays bare that the nation's youth do not know their history.
But a report recently presented to Congress details that the historical ignorance of today's youth is bought and paid for by foreign money, much of it from Middle Eastern and authoritarian regimes with a hatred for the United States.
The report is a consolidation of six studies and its overall conclusion states "A massive influx of foreign donations to American institutions of higher learning, much of it concealed and from authoritarian regimes, with notable support from Middle Eastern sources, reflects or supports heightened levels of intolerance towards Jews, open inquiry, and free expression."
Any historian worth their salt would correctly say Palestine is (and has been) a region and not a specific people or state.
For over 2,500 years, and spanning multiple occupiers of the region that includes Israel, there has never been a Palestine on any map but what is found before the modern era is the Kingdom of Israel.
The use of the name Palestine has been traced back to the Roman Empire circa 135 AD, and, at around that time Palestine was used to refer to Judea and parts of Syria as well.
It was not until the modern era, and through a request by Jews, that Palestine became anything other than a name for a long-ago region.
Historian Daniel Pipes has often written about the creation of Palestine by the British in 1920 - at the urging of the Jews. His long version of his paper, "The Year the Arabs Discovered Palestine," explains this concept in detail.
Going back to the disturbing percentage of youth who sided with Hamas in the Harvard/Harris poll, this past month the Israel Defense Forces published a video on the history of Hamas.
It's six minutes long and arguably a very condensed version of the rise of Hamas, however, it hits the big notes and is factually accurate. It would be interesting to see the reactions of college students after viewing it.
More To The Story
The Harvard/Harris Poll's results are similar to those found in a survey conducted by The Economist and YouGov that found 1 in 5 young Americans between the age of 18-29 believe the Holocaust is a "myth."
Putting that more bluntly, 1 in 5 of 18-29-year-olds in the U.S. does not believe 6 million Jews were systematically murdered by the Nazis.
The Economist/YouGov survey question prompts participants to indicate their level of agreement with the statement asserting that "the Holocaust is a myth," offering response options of "strongly agree," "tend to agree," "tend to disagree," "strongly disagree," or "neither agree nor disagree."
Across the entire sample, only 7% chose either "strongly agree" (2%) or "tend to agree" (5%).
Among individuals aged 18-29, this percentage rose to 20% including 8% who "strongly agree" and 12% who "tend to agree."
Houston, we have a serious problem.
North Carolina has an answer. Sort of.
In 2021, the North Carolina General Assembly passed the Gizella Abramson Holocaust Education Act, also known as the NC Holocaust Education Act.
The Act in North Carolina builds on the 2020 federal Never Again Education Act.
The NC Department of Public Instruction has an office dedicated to implementing this law that includes the development of instructional resources and their implementation called the North Carolina Council on the Holocaust.
Holocaust education has been incorporated into the state's Social Studies and English Language Arts curriculum for grades six-12.
So are NC kids in in those grades learning about the Holocaust?
That's unclear, however, I can report what my children have experienced.
My youngest child, who is in 7th grade, has had little to no instruction on the Holocaust so far. When I asked him if he learned anything yet about the Holocaust, he responded, "What is that?"
My oldest, in his junior year in high school, told me the Holocaust was covered for "about a week" in his freshman year.
While my sons' reactions were alarming at first, after a brief discussion of what the Holocaust was, both of them knew - without being prompted - that it involved concentration camps and the use of gas chambers and other forms of mass killings that resulted in the death of 6 million Jews during World War II by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.
Both of my sons reported they felt their history and social studies classes were too narrow in topics being covered.
Both said that most of their social studies time both in K-5 and middle school spent an inordinate amount of time on slavery in early America.
That explained a lot to me such as finding out a few years ago that neither of them had been taught the national anthem. I recall learning that in kindergarten.
We remedied the anthem situation pretty damn quickly, along with learning to read and write in cursive - which is mandated by state law, yet schools are not doing it.
One may ask, why aren't schools teaching it? Districts have no incentive to teach cursive and the law has no enforcement mechanism in it.
Your kid wants to read the Magna Carta? Good luck! Or, as one teacher once told me, why would they bother with cursive when 'everything is typed' or can be translated on Google?
Taking in all that's been covered here and thinking of education in the U.S. as a house, the roof (post-secondary) is missing half its shingles, and the foundation (K-12) is cracked and sinking to one side.
Parents have been moving out of that house for school choice in droves. Meanwhile, parents with kids in public schools have to, at worst, reprogram their kids, and, at best, provide a lot of supplemental material.
We're the latter in our house. Last year, Santa brought our boys Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" and the Federalist Papers. This year, it's books on the geographical history of the Middle East and Europe.