i don't get the whole titanic thing either, and I'm no kid. a bunch of rich folks died at a party because the host-capt. was drunk either on booze or his own ego. a more touching story is the women in NYC who died in a fire making shirts so that they could have food on the table. My motto: never underestimate the taste of the american public. It's hard at work on this one. Kuddos: a risky post.

basically agree with you however, titanic is a cautionary tale of hyped new technology that bears repeating. its a story of human hubris. the psychological aspects of the tragedy are timeless. the particular incident is perhaps not crucial.

there is a common saying about insanity being the endless repetition of a failing strategy and expecting a different result. Well, for those who don't know the history, what can we say? So they are not insane, just deluded. For a modern democratic population, I hesitate to say it;s OK.

I agree with most of your article, Scott, but can't go with you on belittling the importance of the Titanic. Sure, its only "historical" significance was in bringing about a long-overdue revamping of North Atlantic safety standards - I know, big whoop, right? If that's all it was, of course no one would care.

I wouldn't have cared either. The Titanic went down a full half century before I entered this world, but I knew about it from an early age, probably because of countless TV programs and children's books on the subject. This sort of thing has multiplied since my childhood, especially since the wreck itself was discovered and exhaustively filmed/plundered, and the news that so many young people supposedly had NEVER HEARD of the event (and weren't just wondering whether the love story in James Cameron's film were true) makes me wonder where they've been all their short lives. You'd really have to be living entirely off the grid never to have heard about it, which makes me wonder what else they've never heard of - and I don't mean whether they're aware of basically non-entities like Paul McCartney.

The Titanic is significant in popular culture as a cautionary tale about technological hubris and gross incompetence. The same basic all-too human story gets repeated over and over again: In the insane material battles of the First World War, the explosion of the Hindenburg, most of the World War II experience, the Concorde boondoggle (not the random accident that finally gave bureaucrats an excuse to kill it), the utterly avoidable Challenger disaster, our environmental meltdown, and, as you rightly note, our current fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention our current financial disarray.

The Titanic disaster encapsulates all of that and much more in a wonderfully concise and tragic story. It's a metaphor for our modern world, practically a figure of speech, a cautionary tale for all those who are eager to place their trust in authority figures who claim their schemes are "unsinkable" and, don't worry, there are plenty of lifeboats to go around.

I find the notion that there may be substantial numbers of people out there who aren't aware of this easy-to-understand story, and who consequently have no concept whatsoever of the warning it entails for us all, utterly terrifying.

After all, there are plenty of icebergs waiting out there for us while the captain issues the order for full steam ahead and then retires for the night.

Sorry, Scott, but I'd have to agree with what others are saying here. I think the real concern is the apparent inability to separate fiction from fact. Even if they aren't familiar with the details, kids should know a real ship called the Titanic hit an iceberg and sank, killing lots of people. Otherwise, any movie, fiction or fact, can alter history.

For something you say isn't important you sure wrote a lot about it.

These darn kids today...

...Bla, bla, bla.

Why does the older generation assume that they were better educated and informed?

There are plenty of old dumb-asses. Stupidity knows no age. I can guarantee you that there are some people old enough for AARP that believe that Sherlock Holmes was a real person and the Titanic was just a story.

The difference is that they don't know how to use Tweet.

.

BTW -- I was agreeing with you.

Scott, well done. In my own piece on the Titanic I attempted to show why its story has enduring meaning for people who are acvout it. But that does not subtract from your main point, which is that the history one generation passes onto the next must continue to have relevance and meaning to that younger generation, otherwise it is narcissism and cultural chauvinism -- the imposition of what was important to us onto others without concern for them. And in that regard, Titanic is a Trivial Pursuit question rather than something students must to told about, just like that big earthquake in Spain or Italy back in the 1700s that supposedly changed the course of history. See, I just proved your point!

Where we are agreed, I think, is that people still need to have a sense of history in those areas that are important for their obligations as citizens of a republic. Otherwise we are like amnesiacs who have no memory and so don't know who we are. This leaves us vulnerable to those who would exploit our ignorance to their own advantage.

To expose my own political prejudice here, I am thinking about the Tea Party and how they dress up in colonial garb and claim to be the direct descendents of the Founding Fathers. Here you have a political group made up almost entirely of white, Christian (mostly male) conservatives whose politics promote divide and conquer "factionalism," yet who nevertheless claim to draw their inspiration from Founding Fathers who created a Constitution for the express purpose of (in the words of James Madison) "breaking and controlling the violence of faction."

You'd never know that if you hadn't read the Federalist Papers or know the history, which most Tea Partiers don't. And so what we are left with in 2012 is a political movement whose major selling point as and entire claim to legitimacy as "Real Americans" rests with a connection to a distant past that is entirely bogus.

It's not so much that kids need to care about what we did as it is that they don't seem to care about...or be interested in or know about anything outside their own timeline. I suppose you could make an argument that it doesn't matter if kids know about history in general --and sometimes they don't seem to--except that knowing that some event was a big deal to people loving at the time humanizes that
history and might even provide some much-needed perspective

I agree with the post and disagree with the commenters that Titantic has some sort of cultural meaning. It was a wreck of a private vessel by a moron. There were no national or state entities at work, no act of terrorism, no act of political will. It was a bad thing that happened. That doesn't make it historically significant or even a metaphor.

James Cameron got real rich making some other movies, and got interested in Titanic like Geraldo before him. In his own words "I wanted to see the wreck more than make the movie" and suddenly it's "important." There is cool stuff at the bottom of the ocean that has been sold to rich people to display baubles of other rich people. Yawn.

To use a bad pun - it just doesn't float my boat.

Well said.

Yes, some valid points here. But there's is also validity in making subjective criticisms of today's culture versus the past's. Just because something is new or current does not make it inferior OR superior to what's come before. Or even equal to. Sometimes there are indeed cycles of quality, even if this is not apparent until after the fact. Does anyone argue that what came immediately AFTER the Shakespearean era in English drama was as good as Shakespeare? The the Golden Age of Athens didn't represent an apex, notable from the periods before and after? One can certainly make an argument for one's preferred era of music to be "better" than another (proving this may be impossible), because to pretend otherwise is to have no standards of excellence by which to measure.

I can say that the pop music of the Sixties is more innovative and impressive and richer than the pop music of the Seventies, or the music of today. I can say that classical music of what we now recognize as the Baroque period is "greater" than classical music of the 20th century. You don't have to agree with or believe those things, but they are valid statements within this context.

"In short, the people that have done the most harm to this country over the last 15 years were not a bunch of dumb kids sitting at the back of class and ignoring their history teachers. They were (politically-subjective rant alert) the alleged cream of the crop..."

Actually it is precisely the dumb kids sitting at the back of class who are responsible -- the dumb kids who, having ignored their history teacher, then blithely back the 'brightest and best' no matter how obviously stupid the plan is.

There are, it's true, worse things that not realizing that Titanic was a real ship that really sank. There are, for example, the kids of a previous generation who watched "Schindler's List" and were shocked to learn that that these Nazis were real people and that the camps and everything else really existed. Or the ones who don't realize that the Berlin Wall was a real wall, and don't grasp what it means to actually wall off one people from another and shoot anyone who tries to cross the border.

Those are probably more crucial pieces of history to be missing, all things considered, than Titanic going down. There are a few. But really, can you really sit there and say that one of the 20th century's most dramatic demonstrations of how we can think we've got technology and nature all figured out and yet something unexpected can still catastrophically fling all of our best intentions and complacency to the rocks -- you really think that's not relevant to the modern day?

You don't think it might have just a teensy weensy bit of relevance to the pride and prejudice of the glibly technoafffluent class? You don't think it just might speak, in some small way, to the questions of nature and technology we face today?

Just, you know, a teeny tiny bit relevant, maybe?