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The average person is pretty ignorant, and this applies to many who have gone through more modern and recent advanced schooling.  I found it interesting talking to a guy in his 80s who had a Master's and was a professor of history.  He said that the coursework required to get his high school diploma was more difficult and required much more thinking than what most colleges require now to get a Bachelor's Degree outside of very technical fields.  He also got his Master's fairly recently and said aside from more work from a physical perspective it was not harder to get than the Bachelor's degree he got in the late 1930s.  Standards seem to have dropped precipitously in the last century.  Heck, just look at the English curriculum from the 8th grade around the turn of the 19th century and compare it to today's college level English 101.  The 8th grade course from back then is more thorugh, advanced, and difficult, and that's just pon the grammar and spelling portion.

I actually wrote a paper on this and I think that part of the problem is that we go to school more for the certification because a job requires and just do whatever steps we have to to get there if we can and pay the required monies if necessary.  Education has also in many cases stopped being about discovering Truth, which is the key to genuine knowledge.  Rather, the focus seems to be more on facts or the sum of all facts and not much more, and that will only get you so far and is easily perishable in the mind.  I actually think this is the bigger problem.  

Just look at how an important figure might be addressed.  Let's say Niccolo Machiavelli gets brought up in a lesson.  Most of the time all you will be taught or just expected to know (with or without being told it directly) is his name, where he was from, that he wrote "The Prince," what his title or job was, and when he was born and died.  Knowig this is pretty much next to worthless.  You haven't learned anything from being able to recite these things.  What is important and what is only addressed by the best of instructors when and where they can is what the significance of his work was, how it impacted rulers and history, how it affected ideas regarding governance and politics, and what the philosophical or other origins of his writing are and how they are significant and impacted the contemporaries of Machiavelli; it is also good to know how he can be applied to day and his influence and presence (intellectually and practically speaking) in today's world.  The other facts are only needed to help put these things into context.  

With the holocaust, I have never seen it addrssed for more than a couple of weeks and you only are taught that it happened, that Hitler was behind it as well as the Nazis, that it was in the context of a world war, when it took place and where, and who the targets were and who and how many people died.  You learn that it was bad.  You learn about some girl named Anne Frank and that she wrote a diary and you read some parts of it.  Outside of that it is not approached very much.  It leaves the student with nothing to really give it significance, without an ability to understand why it happened and thus no ability to understand ways to prevent it from happening again in a political context, and without understanding the impact of those events upo history.  It just becomes a small set of facts easily dwarfed by all the others you are told and required to kow that one can easily forget about it, especially when it has no apparent application anywhere in their later life.  Given this and the fact that most people, at least three quarters, are not really all that bright and often could care less about history, it is not surprising to me at all that many people would be so ignorant, even someone with a Master's degree.  

If you want a real education you really have to take it upon yourself.  The schools for the most part will not give it to you.  I learned far more in independent studies on my own time than I ahve learned in all of my formal schooling combined.

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Or maybe she's not so dumb....

I present to you...... SHRINK wrapped potatoes  
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3121/2558993584_08a2ddba21.jpg?v=0

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I thought he changed the spelling when he moved to South America!

 

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Bet she still doesn't know Stalin was orders of magnitude worse...

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Not a lot of people do, and not many people know that Mao was an even more prolific killer.

If I remember right the numbers were something like:

Mao: 70 Million

Stalin: 17 Million

Hitler: 6 Million

I certainly didn't learn about Mao and Stalin in school. Hitler however was thoroughly covered

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People are fucking idiots.

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Same here. Any public school I have seen teaches the holocaust very thoroughly. In all likelihood, she failed the educational system, it didn't fail her.  

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Bet she still doesn't know Stalin was orders of magnitude worse...

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She was fucking with you.

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I had a friend of my niece ask me why the wrappers on the potatoes were so tight.