And another thing that involves our trip to the Air Force museum… I thought it was interesting to note what the students did and did not know. As I just said in the earlier post, they knew ALL ABOUT the nuclear bombs, but when we passed the Pearl Harbor exhibit, they didn’t look twice. Most of them knew nothing about it.
When we entered the “Cold War” section of the museum concerning the “conflict” between the US and USSR, they knew nothing about that. One of the American students with us is a Political Science major, and he did an excellent job of explaining it. I don’t they understood it even then. They had never heard of Capitalism or Communism. Maybe it’s just a matter of them having different terms for these ideas in Japan, but I don’t think so. It’s like they had never even heard the ideas before.
Another time, on another day, someone mentioned the Iraq War, and they knew nothing about that either. I guess I can understand that, since Japan isn’t really involved in Iraq very much, but not know about Pearl Harbor or Communism (with China right next door)?
Granted, these are mostly engineering and medical students, but it sounds like they have a fairly low knowledge of history. I’ll leave it to you to speculate on why that might be the case.
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