Both today’s Telegraph and Yahoo News carry a press association story condemning children for not understanding the holocaust and confusing Auschwitz with a beer. According to the Telegraph:
a survey of more than 1,000 secondary school pupils aged 11-16 revealed that a quarter still did not know its purpose.
Of those, about 10 per cent were not sure what it was, 8 per cent thought it was a country bordering Germany, 2 per cent thought it was a beer, the same proportion said it was a religious festival and a further 1 per cent said it was a type of bread.
This survey was carried out by the firm Dubit Limited who specialise in market research involving teenagers, and commissioned by Miramax and the London Jewish Cultural Centre to promote the release of the film The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas on DVD. The data from the survey appears worrying and the reportage is quick to condemn the perceived ignorance of the young about the greatest atrocity to have taken place on European soil.
However there are a number of problems with this survey, as a private company whose polling method is clearly of commercial value, Dubit do not describe in any detail their methodologies on their site. This means that the validity of the poll in terms of the questions asked, statistical weightings used and data collection method are impossible to analyse and such research would not pass muster in the halls of academia. It is not possible to know how credible this poll can be with respect to its methodology and data set.
But this is not the greatest concern I have with this story as it is reported. The curriculum for history specificially states that the Holocaust is to be covered in some detail, but not until Year 9, when the pupils are 13-14 years old. This means that a large part of the dataset used by Dubit, covering ages 11-16, would not have studied the Holocaust, thus skewing the findings of the poll. Given this it is a fairly positive finding that three quarters of the polled students know the purpose of Auschwitz. This was not the line taken by the press, Dubit, Miramax and the London Jewish Cultural Centre. Were none of these organisations or individual journalists capable of checking what proportion of 11-16 years olds would be expected to understand the Holocaust based on the curriculum, or did they just not care? Miramax have publicised their film, the London Jewish Cultural Centre have increased their media profile and Dubit have taken money for a useless survey. The only loser here is the public who have been misled by all of the above.
