Posted by
Cary Wesberry on Thursday, March 13, 2008 4:15:21 PM
It was like opening the New York Times on a Wednesday morning in February 2008 and seeing the headline “Lindbergh Baby Kidnapped” or “Hitler Marches Into Rhineland.” Like the movie “Groundhog Day,” where the same thing keeps happening over and over. Definitely déjà vu, as actress/author Simone Signoret put it, all over again.
The headline in question: “Survey Finds Teenagers Ignorant on Basic History and Literature Questions.” And this time around it’s not farce, it’s still tragedy. Because the same headlines announcing the same deplorable facts appeared 25 years ago, and nothing seems to have changed in the intervening years. Yes, there have been many kinds of changes in the schools since the mid-1980s, but improvement in what really counts – what young Americans know about their country and their world – is not among them.
Anxiety about the state of schooling in America was launched in 1957 with Sputnik, the USSR satellite program that served to warn that the U.S. was falling behind in the technology race. Finally, in 1983, a blue-ribbon commission was created by the Reagan administration to investigate the question of what had been happening to America’s schools. The result was a brilliant report titled “A Nation At Risk,” which declared, “Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world” and identified the dimension of the problem “that undergirds American prosperity, security, and civility…. the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people…. If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.
As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. We have even squandered the gains in student achievement made in the wake of the Sputnik challenge….We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament. Our society and its educational institutions seem to have lost sight of the basic purposes of schooling, and of the high expectations and disciplined effort needed to attain them.”
A gauntlet had been thrown down before the educational establishment, and plans for reform seemed to come from all directions. But before settling on the diagnosis and cure, the symptoms have to be identified. This was the purpose of a ground-breaking book by education historian Diane Ravitch and policy expert Chester E. Finn, Jr., titled “What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know: A Report on the First National Assessment of History and Literature.”
Analyzing the results of a test administered to a sample of high-school juniors of different races, sexes, income levels and geographic regions, Ravitch and Finn revealed some shocking numbers. Little more than half could answer the questions on literature or history. Only 20% could identify Joyce or Dostoevsky, fewer than 25% could identify Henry James or Thomas Hardy, only one in three knew Chaucer was the author of The Canterbury Tales, 65% did not know what 1984 or Lord of the Flies is about.
It gets worse. One third of these American high school students could not identify the phrase “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as coming from the Declaration of Independence and even those who identified the phrase correctly could not articulate the document’s significance; some who found the phrase familiar thought it came from the Gettysburg Address.
Three quarters of the students did not know when Abraham Lincoln was president; three of every ten could not place the Civil War in the proper half-century. More than a third could not place the writing of the Constitution in the proper half-century. Map questions revealed only the most elementary knowledge of American or European geography; many girls, black and Hispanic students had trouble locating Great Britain. For the most part what information or misinformation students had about world events and great works of literature seem to come from movies and television rather than from school.
Fast forward to last week’s New York Times article. Twenty-five years after the wake-up call of “A Nation at Risk,” twenty years after the depressing answer to “What Do Our Seventeen-Year Olds Know,” the news in 2008 is that our schools still aren’t doing their job and that our high school students remain ignorant of basic U.S. and world history and literature. The familiar story reported by the Times: Fewer than half of today’s American teenagers today asked questions from the 1986 survey knew when the Civil War was fought, and one in four said Columbus sailed to the New World “some time after 1750.” (The Times adds to the last sentence “not in 1492,” in case some of its readers might not know the date either. After all, they are products of America’s schools.)
Other results were equally appalling when one considers that these are the citizens who will choose the next generation of the country’s leaders – and who might even be among those leaders themselves. About a quarter of today’s high school juniors were unable to identify Hitler as Germany’s leader in World War II. The rest guessed he was a munitions maker, an Austrian premier or the German Kaiser. Roughly half knew Job as the Biblical figure embodying patience in the face of suffering. The other half thought he might have been a builder, a warrior or a prophet. While the past and its great works remain a mystery to most American teenagers, what they do know illustrates the emphasis on race in today’s curriculum. Although uncertain about Abraham Lincoln, most were familiar with Martin Luther King, Jr. and knew the plot of To Kill a Mockingbird.
Read Part II and III by Rita Kramer at the link above. The downright hideous Communist rule of our public schools is producing the dumbest generation ever to one-day govern our country. It's embarrassing to read this article. This is what you get when we allow liberal-Commie-fascists to run our schools and universities. This is not the worst education; it's no education at all! The anti-education of our teenagers drills MLK into their heads but doesn't teach them the importance of Abrahm Lincoln. Know why? Lincoln was a Republican. How on Earth could teaching teenagers that Republican freed the slaves while Democrats gave their lives to keep them in bondage do any good for liberals? Destroying history is the name of the game in our public schools. Churning out brainwashed graduates all the more ready to be dominated by Communist college professors is the goal.
Ann Coulter on Democrats educating our children: Stalin said, "Give me your children and in 50 years I'll control the state." Hitler said, "Give me your textbooks and in 50 years I'll control the state." Democrats said, "Give me control of your public schools and in 50 years no one will know how to read."
Lovely. We're living it folks. Don't believe me? Go ask the first teenager you can find about any aspect of relevant history and see what they tell you. Their minds are filled with pop-culture and sex because that is exactly how the Democrats and their Communist slave-masters want it. You can be anything you want kids, as long as you don't grow up to be a responsible and good American.