Fair warning – today’s blog is more of a rant.
On the double edged sword that is facebook, someone shared a post that said “65% of millennials don’t know what Auschwitz is”. I vehemently hate comments like it this. Firstly – site your sources, where has this figure come from? Secondly I suspect that it’s been thrown out into the ether to make young people look bad, in a world that already excludes them, a world that is tough to navigate and is only getting tougher. Millennials are less likely to own their own home, they work more hours for less pay than their parents (proportionately) and they get a lot of bad press. And for some reason are always talked about alongside avocado’s.
I find it extremely unlikely that this ‘fact’ is correct and I’m not really sure why millennials are so disliked. If millennials don’t know what Auschwitz is, surely its an indictment of our education system and not them? Having said that, we’re of a generation where information is available to us at a touch of a button, of a swipe of a screen or a “hey siri…”. We have access to, and take full advantage of the internet. Google has become our encyclopaedia, we have access to all the information in the world. But we also read.
Millennials lead the way in reading, and research shows we’re more likely to read of all purposes (work, school, pleasure), and we read books, articles, blogs, magazines, newspapers. My facebook newsfeed is full of information about politics, current events, environmental factors and lots of book related pages. I care about the world and want to know what is happening in more than just my small corner.
Forbes wrote an article last year reporting on an app called Hooked. Aimed at 13-24 year olds, in two years it had been downloaded a whopping 2 million times. So what is this app, some form of social networking, right? Wrong. It sends stories via SMS to its followers so they can enjoy a good thriller on the go.
In 2018 there was a reported increase of 35% in hardback book sales in the U.K. Now, it might not be millennials buying these, granted. But book sales are booming. Guess what book Goodreads ranked as 11th out of 200 for 2018? The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris *insert gobsmacked emoji here*. The novel is said to be based on a true story, after the author was told the story by Lali Sokolov. It’s come under fire for it’s inaccuracies, but that discussion is for another day. My point is, with 400,00 copies sold in the U.K alone, and reading groups all a twitter with how good it is, how can people not know what Auschwitz is? Any person who went to a comprehensive school past 1993/1994 probably had to watch Schindler’s list.
I did a quick Google search (I promise they’re not paying me, other search engines are available), and found what I think to be the source of the original statistic, an article by the Washington Post. The figure comes from a study by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. They only asked 1350 people and only Americans FYI. However, many of those asked (93%) said that they felt that there should be more education around the Holocaust. I’m getting sidetracked.
My point is this: Young people are reading. A lot. Whether they’re reading fiction, articles or their newsfeeds, they’re constantly having the opportunity to learn. I’ve learnt so many valuable things from all my reading. Margaret Atwood taught me to see oppression in the world and to stand against it and Elizabeth Gaskell taught me the see struggles of social inequality in the victorian era and see how little we’ve changed. I’ve also learnt some less valuable things. Want to get rid of slugs from your vegetable garden without pesticides? Put cloves of garlic in the soil. Thank you Outlander.
So next time you see a post implying the ignorance or laziness of millennials, maybe you’ll question it. After all 87% of facts on the internet are false…