Their education is unlikely to have left them with any historical panorama or with any idea of a continuing tradition

Their education is unlikely to have left them with any historical panorama or with any idea of a continuing tradition ... a great many people, though they may possess a considerable amount of disconnected information, have little idea of an historical or ideological pattern or process. Their minds rarely go back beyond the times of their own grandparents 

R. Hoggart, The uses of literacy (1957), 167

This is written about the working class, but does seem to be about all people. Maybe that was not so in the 1950s.