Despotic tyranny ruined my life

[davywavy]

I don't know if you caught this one; A-level Modern History students complaining that their final exam was 'too hard' because it contained the question “How far do you agree that Hitler’s role 1933-45 was one of despotic tyranny?”.
Their complaint isn't about it being a badly worded question despite 'despot' and 'tyrant' being somewhat tautologous, but because they actually didn't know what despot or tyrant actually meant. A facebook group to protest about the question ("Despotic tyranny ruined my life") has over 1,600 members which, when you consider that 6,000 people took the exam, suggests that a quarter or more of 18 year old history students - people with a self-declared interest in the subject, who might want to study history at university and then get a job presenting Time Team - have a vocabulary which didn't include what I would consider fairly basic governmental terms for pretty much the entirety of recorded human history.

I can see them now; the massed ranks of students in the exam hall, pens a-quiver and eager of neuron to display their hard-gained knowledge. Then, the words "Turn your papers over now". A rustling fills the room followed by...silence. There, spitefully inserted into an A-Level history question about Hitler, the word 'Despot'. Their formerly gleaming eyes dull into glazed incomprehension. As one, their mouths fall open like so many fish and thin trickles of drool begin to collect in their laps. Once-pristine knuckles sprout thick hair and slip to rest upon the ground.

I'm hardly the sharpest tool in the box (my academic record speaks for itself in its unremitting mediocrity) but if I hadn't known what a Despot was when I was 18, I wouldn't have joined groups to complain about it; I'd've kept it damn quiet. I'd've been embarrassed. Perhaps I'd've thought that this gap in my knowledge was at least in part my own responsibility. I didn't even study History to that level, and I think there was little chance of my being asked about the despotic tyranny of Hydrogen over the periodic table in my Chemistry final.

I know some of you lot out there are teachers - what the devil? Can you shed any light on this for me?

Updated from cavalorn: Nice to see groups appearing expressing a contrary position.

Comments

[pond823.livejournal.com]

I think I have another one. I've worked at Endemol, Sky and C4 and while being shut away in the IT team doesn't expose you to everything there, I certainly saw an amazing disconnection in the upper middle class production staff.

They shaped the views, aspirations and morals of a generation and didn't know. They'd complain bitterly about teens today, about all the things we agree are wrong without stopping to consider if they should make yet another Big Brother or talent contest. These are the new teachers and they couldn't care less.

They are surprisingly a lot like the traders I worked with in the city, in utter denial that they should or could have any guiding influence on their social environments. They retreat to fortress Englishman's home is his castle in Surrey but still think the starving peasants outside should have the same value judgments as them. If ever the term Ivory Tower was applicable then it is to them. And these, these were the nice ones. The nasty ones, the ones really climbing to the top, were the wolves that would shoot all the chickens and store them in their great big freezers in Zurich.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

I have to wonder how much of the TV commissioning behaviour is down to the internet and the fracturing of the advertising market; I was watching some Poirot and the old granada Sherlock Holmes over the weekend and I was downright astonished by the production standards; I'd say the only time we see anything of that standard now is in joint productions like ROME.
Big brother is very cheap to make and lots of people watch it, so it's good TV as far as C4 are concerned.