It’s amazing what falls down the memory hole:
My daughter, a high school junior, has a classmate whose parents are attracted to Buddhism. They accordingly went off to some Buddhist countries for their summer vacation. One of those countries was Cambodia. The classmate came back and told Nellie about the trip, then Nellie told me: “She said it was so poor, she couldn’t believe it. People begging everywhere …”Well, I said, in view of what happened there in the 1970s, it’s not surprising they’re still poor.
“Why?” asked Nellie, puzzled. “What happened there?”
Subsequent enquiries revealed that at no point in her eleven years of public schooling had my daughter been told about the Khmer Rouge dictatorship of Cambodia. All right, it’s a small and inconsequential country: but this was one of the great horrors of the past forty years. It doesn’t even get a mention? The lowest estimates of deaths in the killing fields are of 20 percent of Cambodia’s population being murdered. Some other scholarly estimates go up to 32 percent — one Cambodian in three. This, in the name of a revolutionary peasant socialism not far removed from that preached by current leftist icons like Che Guevara.
And you can graduate from a good-quality public high school without knowing anything about it? Good grief.