The past is not so distant as we may imagine
For anyone with the initiative to look for it, the past is omnipresent, accessible, almost tangible.
“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there”. The famous, much-quoted opening line from L. P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between might serve as a leitmotif for those becoming concerned about the extent to which young people today are increasingly devoid of any knowledge of the past.
It is an anomaly that, despite the fact that no preceding generation ever had access to the vast amount of information easily available today, or the leisure to absorb it, for the majority of young people a new Iron Curtain has come down: not separating them from a rival power bloc, but from even recent history. They do not know their past, so that they have become culturally deracinated. That puts them at risk of suffering the penalty adumbrated in another famous quotation, by the philosopher George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
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