Or perhaps we might also wonder if and where they learned that it is perfectly fine to express a mischievous, rebellious or playful side through the use of such cruel and divisive imagery. This generation of children has grown up with constant screen time, inundated with an endless stream of images that eventually renders many of those visual signifiers meaningless, where Nazi symbolism is just processed as more cartoonish provocation.

Just this week during an assembly at Sidwell Friends, the progressive Quaker school in Washington from which Chelsea Clinton and Malia Obama graduated, a student participating in a trivia contest flashed a user name consisting of two swastikas onto a screen visible to the whole auditorium. It was not the first time that swastikas have shown up at the school in recent months.

And in Orange County, Calif., a group of high-school students came under fire for building a swastika out of red, plastic beer cups during a drinking game at a party. Were they bilious members of the alt-right?

When one participant apologized on social media, she said that she considered what she and her friends had done as “a joke” and “not a big deal,” until photos of the incident went viral and they realized the seriousness of their antics.

The contemporary school environment emphasizes diversity and inclusion to a point unprecedented in history. Children are put in restorative circles and taught to love and respect one another, to make up and never to antagonize, tease, bully or invalidate. But do these conceptualizations stand up to the corrective lessons of history?

New York is one of a number of states in which Holocaust education is mandated, but the general shift toward a greater focus on science, technology and mathematics and away from the humanities, happening across the education system and around the country, has pushed certain subjects and ideas dangerously into the rearview.

Last year a study conducted by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, for example, interviewed 1,350 American adults and found that 66 percent of millennial respondents could not identify Auschwitz as a concentration camp.