Why are younger generations so clueless to history?

I understand young people are voting in higher and higher numbers. That is a truism. However, their votes are often not determined as much by political issues or ideology but rather by sensationalism and trendiness.

Scary but accurate

I've recently run into grown adults who didn't know what Hiroshima or Nagasaki were. While not much surprises me anymore, I tried thinking back as far as I could (the earliest memories I have are from 1990/1991) and I couldn't remember the moment I heard about Hiroshima or Nagasaki. I couldn't remember ever "learning" about The Beatles or Ronald Reagan or anything of popular culture/historical significance before my time.

Hiroshima, Japan - 1945

When these people my age, maybe slightly younger or older told me they had no clue what this was, I told them they are Japanese cities that were destroyed by the United States when we dropped nuclear weapons on them to end World War II. I then wondered, do they even know the significance of nuclear weapons? Is a nuclear bomb to them no different than an old fashioned stick of dynamite? Do they realize that for nearly 50 years there was a looming threat of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States?

1960 Cold War Era Comic Book

A year or so ago on the Fourth of July, I asked a very sweet and pretty 18 year old girl I was acquaintances with why we celebrate the Fourth of July. She couldn't tell me. She said, "I don't know. Why?" I told her to "celebrate our Declaration of Independence from Great Britain on July 4, 1776." She responded with an uninterested, "Oh."

I'm willing to bet that all they hear was, "To celebrate our BLAH BLAH BLAH from BLAH BLAH BLAH on July 4, 1776." (which I bet even the date throws them off since anything pre-2006 seems prehistoric to them). She could not only care less, but seemed bored and uninterested of ever having any idea about the circumstances which caused her to have the freedom to be so clueless.

Writer Mark Bauerlein's book, "The Dumbest Generation" made a fantastic point with an excerpt about 1776:

"Think of how many things you must do in order NOT to know the year 1776 or the British prime minister or the Fifth Amendment. At the start, you must forget the lessons of school-history class, social studies, government, geography, English, philosophy, and art history. You must care nothing about current events, elections, foreign policy, and war. No newspapers, no political magazines, no NPR or Rush Limbaugh, no CNN, Fox News, network news or NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. No books on the Cold War or the Found, no biographies, nothing on Bush or Hillary, terrorism or religion, Europe or the Middle East. No political activity and no community activism. And your friends must act the same way, never letting a historical fact or current affair slip into a cell phone exchange.

It isn't enough to say that these young people are uninterested in world realities. They are actively cut off from them. Or a better way to put it is to say that they are encased in more immediate realities that shut out conditions beyond-friends, work, clothes, cars, pop music, sitcoms, Facebook. Each day, the information they receive and the interactions they have must be so local or superficial that the facts of government, foreign and domestic affairs, the historical past, and the fine arts never slip through. How do they do it?"

Am I wrong to find this disturbing? What are your opinions on it?