The Millennials can’t remember very much – and they don’t learn very much either. It’s easy being hot for socialism or communism when you actually have a very little idea of what it is and what it did throughout the 20th century. And the Ys have that ignorance in spades; one third of them think that George W Bush killed more people than Stalin and 42 per cent have never heard of Mao – but over 70 per cent agree with Bernie Sanders. Some research suggests that only 15 per cent actually have a correct understanding of socialism. It’s not just politics; the Millennials are the most woefully undereducated and miseducated generation in a very long time. To be fair, that’s not strictly their fault; that attaches itself again to their Boomer grandparents who have been in charge of our failing education systems during this time. Combine the modern indoctrination-cum-dumbification taking place in schools and universities with the attention span-killing impact of information technology and social media, and you have a barely literate cohort, which is simply not equipped with the necessary mental tools to learn about the real world even if they wanted to.The wonderful thing about historical ignorance is that you can take a word, say "Christianity" or "socialism", and turn into whatever you want it to be, even to a simplistic level. Christianity = bad; socialism = good. See, I'm now a deep thinker.
I'm not ready to take the blame for this, however. My students received an education and they'll be the first to tell you so. I wanted them to be able to think for themselves in a world that was obviously becoming disjointed from knowledge. There was an advantage to being the teacher everyone was afraid to have.