In 1986 the National Endowment for the Humanities sponsored the first national assessment of what high school seniors knew about history and literature. Nearly 8,000 17-year-old students of different races, both sexes, and all regions of the US – from private and public schools – were tested and the results were published in a book authored by Diane Ravitch and Chester E. Finn, Jr., What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know?
Well, apparently they didn’t know enough to earn a passing grade – they correctly answered 54% of the history questions and 52% of the literature questions.
Three-quarters of the students did not know when Lincoln was president; one-third did not know what the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision was about; 70% could not identify the Magna Carta. One-third did not know that the phrase “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” comes from the Declaration of Independence; some attributed it to the Gettysburg Address.
Only 20% could identify James Joyce, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ralph Ellison, Joseph Conrad, or Henrik Ibsen, only one in three knew that Chaucer is the author of The Canterbury Tales; 65% did not know what 1984 or Lord of the Flies is about.
Almost 25 years later the Department of Education last week released the 2010 National Assessment of Educational Progress. Of the seven subjects on the national test, students performed the worst in U.S. history; only 13% of the 12,000 high school seniors can be considered “proficient” according to the standards of the test administrators. The test was also given to 7,000 fourth graders and 11,000 eighth graders.
Fewer than a quarter of the 12th-graders, for example, knew that China was North Korea's ally during the Korean War. The percentage of seniors considered proficient in 2010 has not changed since the last time the test was given – 2006. More than half of all seniors posted scores at the lowest achievement level, "below basic."
There is much to criticize in the National Assessment test. While sponsored at the federal level, it is administered by the states with state-to-state differences on the standards. Some of the questions have multiple choice answers, but others ask the students for a short “constructed” (essay) response, for example, to interpret the meaning of a World War II poster or give two reasons why George Washington was an important leader. These subjective answers must be graded by administrators to determine if they represent an adequate or inadequate answer – also requiring a subjective determination which is likely to vary from state to state.
Uniformity of standards is needed but the last place it should come from is the federal government. The federal government should never have been involved in a state’s educational system in the first place. Where is that authorized in the Constitution?
A frequent criticism of public education today is its political correctness and that revisionist history is being taught. In fact a controversy raged in Texas last year over the content of textbooks and the history curriculum. The current curriculum plays down the role of Thomas Jefferson among the founding fathers, despite being the author of the Declaration of Independence, the third US President, and the President responsible for the Louisiana Purchase. Texas Board of Education discussions ranged from whether President Reagan should get more attention (yes), whether hip-hop should be included as part of lessons on American culture (no), and whether President of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis's inaugural address should be studied alongside Abraham Lincoln's (yes).
A Board member who is a dentist by training, pushed through a change to the teaching of the civil rights movement to ensure that students also study the violent philosophy of the Black Panthers in addition to the nonviolent approach of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He further made sure that textbooks would mention the votes in Congress on civil rights legislation, which Republicans supported and many Democrats opposed.
Another Board member won approval for an amendment saying students should study “the unintended consequences” of the Great Society legislation, affirmative action, and Title IX legislation. He further won approval for an amendment stressing that Germans and Italians as well as Japanese were interned in the US during World War II, to counter the idea that the internment of Japanese was motivated by racism.
History revisionists around the country howled that the Texas Board members were unqualified to specify a history curriculum because they weren’t historians. Well, yes. However, I’m not trained in animal husbandry, but I can tell the difference between horse hockey and cow pies. I think the Texas Board is qualified to distinguish history from historical horse hockey.
Keep in mind that the revisionists wrote the textbooks and suggested what and how the curriculum would be taught. Texas is one of the two largest textbook buyers in the nation. Publishers will now have to comply with the Board’s requirements in order to sell in that state, which means the Texas decisions will influence how history will be taught in other states as well, because publishers can’t afford a Texas text and different texts for other states.
In his American Interest blog this week, Walter Russell Mead noted that when it comes to excellence in education, red states rule – at least according to a panel of experts assembled by Newsweek. Using a set of indicators ranging from graduation rates to college admissions and SAT scores, the panel reviewed data from high schools all over the country to find the best public schools in the country.
The results make depressing reading for teacher unions because the very best public high schools in the country are heavily concentrated in conservative red states.
Three of the nation’s ten best public high schools are in Texas – the no-income tax, right-to-work state that blue model defenders like to characterize as America at its worst. Florida, another no-income tax, right-to-work state long misgoverned by the evil and rapacious Bush dynasty, has two of the top ten schools, Mead notes.
Newsweek isn’t alone with these shocking results. Another top public school list, compiled by the Washington Post, no friend of conservative causes, was issued in May. Texas and Florida rank number one and number two on that list’s top ten as well.
Evidence of revisionism and political correctness comes through in the National Assessment – in the multiple choice and constructed response questions – samples of which are available online. One has to wonder why the NAEP won’t put the entire question set online.
A past assessment asked fourth-graders to identify the document “that contains the basic rules used to run the United States government.” The choices are the Declaration of Independence, the Magna Carta, the Mayflower Compact, and the Constitution. The best answer is, of course, the Constitution, but the question is wrong. Characterizing the US Constitution as “rules to run the government,” even though asked of 10-year olds in the fourth grade, shows how clueless the test designer is. The Constitution is a document that states the limits on the powers of the federal government by explicating what it can’t do and enumerating the few things it can do. That hardly amounts to “rules to run the government.”
Other questions and answers characterize our form of governance as a democracy, which it isn’t; we have a constitutional republic. The two are about as similar as a cat and a dog. Both have four legs but that’s where their likeness ends.
Despite the failings of the NAEP, there can be little doubt that the average American either never received or has forgotten even the minimal level of education required to be a responsible citizen.
Another national survey, this one sponsored by the Bill of Rights Institute, was conducted by Harris Interactive between December 1 and 3, 2010. It revealed a level of ignorance that is lampooned by Jay Leno’s “Man on the Street” interviews. American adults selected the correct answer 32% of the time, on average, on questions about the Bill of Rights, the freedoms it protects, and American government. An embarrassing 42% of the adults surveyed incorrectly chose one of America’s founding documents as the source of the phrase, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs," – which, of course, is the foundational statement of communism articulated by Karl Marx. Of all their incorrect choices, the most frequent incorrect choice was the Bill of Rights.
It’s important for every citizen to understand how America works. Our government derives its powers from the people, not the other way around. Yet, Janet Reno, Clinton’s Attorney General, once told a group of federal law enforcement officers “You are part of a government that has given its people more freedom … than any other government in the history of the world.” This Constitutional Neanderthal obviously didn’t understand the document she was sworn to defend! Within her second-rate mind there has always been a third-rate mind struggling to get out.
Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us, then, that the Harris Interactive survey showed 60% of Americans failed to recognize that a government whose powers derive from the people is something that makes this country exceptional. Perhaps it also ought not surprise us that congressmen fail to understand this, and when grilled by their constituents at town hall meetings, become incensed that they aren’t treated with more deference, calling loud but otherwise peaceful demonstrators Nazis.
In addition to the findings of NAEP and Harris Interactive, we have yet another survey, this one sponsored by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), which commissioned the Roper Center in 2000 to survey seniors at the nation’s best colleges and universities as identified by the U.S. News & World Report’s annual college rankings. Remember, now, that these were college seniors enrolled in supposedly the best 55 schools in the country. They were asked questions from a basic high school history curriculum. Four out of five or 81% of seniors from the top colleges/universities received a grade of D or F based on their answers.
Slightly more than half possessed a passable knowledge of American democracy and the Constitution. Only 34% identified George Washington as the American Commanding General at the battle of Yorktown, the last battle of the American Revolution. More of them (37%) thought Ulysses S. Grant was in charge. He would command the Union Army in the Civil War 80 years later.
Only 42% were able to identify George Washington as “First in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen.” Only 23% correctly identified James Madison as the “father of the Constitution. Most thought it was Jefferson, who was in Paris when the Constitutional Convention was in process.
Only 22% were able to identify the phrase “Government of the people, by the people, and for the people” as a line from the Gettysburg Address; 43% put it in the Declaration of Independence.
Over one-third were unable to identify the US Constitution as establishing the division of power in American government.
Yet 99% knew who Beavis and Butthead were, and 98% knew that Snoop Doggy Dogg was a rap singer. Is this what parents get for an annual tuition that costs up to $50,000?
The future and the defense of the American system are dependent on an educated citizenry. Yet the ACTA survey found that students can graduate from every one of the top 55 colleges and universities in the land without taking a single course in US history. If knowledge of history isn’t required to graduate from college, it will eventually no longer be a requirement for K-12. Then where will we be as a nation?
Thomas Jefferson said “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be.” We are losing our collective memory by not knowing history and with it we lose all that history encompasses to explain what happened that got us where we are.
Why study history? What good is its knowledge? What value is there in knowing the cause and consequences of the Salem witch hunts? Why ask the reason that cities are located where they are – any city? Does it make any difference in our lives to know the causes of the American Civil War? How about the English Civil War? Can today’s conflict between Islam and the West be explained by anything that happened in the past?
Why indeed? Because history lovers are curious people. Voltaire's desire was "… to know what were the steps by which men passed from barbarism to civilization."
Will and Ariel Durant took 50 years – most of their 68 years as husband and wife – to write one history book: their magisterial oeuvre, The Story of Civilization, which was published in 11 volumes. Will Durant had initially planned to write a history of the 19th century. But as he started working on it he found that his subject couldn’t be understood without the knowledge of what had come before. His search for a starting point gradually led him to begin with the pre-Sumerians and to write a history of all civilization, ancient and modern, Occidental and Oriental. As he explained in the preface of a later volume, “The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for our understanding.”
Durant’s conclusion is a succinct rationale for studying and understanding history. If we see humankind as an evolving and connected society, we can’t understand who we are until we understand who we were. And if we have no interest in who we were, it’s hard to understand why it matters who we are. Why then should we be willing to spend blood and treasure to defend a way of life that is rootless – that has no legacy worth protecting? Why would future generations have any interest in our accomplishments?
One premise of our democratic society, which Jefferson recognized over two centuries ago, is that for it to succeed, all of its members must have a sufficient grasp of history and current affairs to "… enable every man to judge for himself what will secure or endanger his freedom." I believe that premise has never been more true than it is today.
At the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, a woman asked Benjamin Franklin what kind of government the Founders had given them. “A Republic, madam,” said Dr. Franklin, “if you can keep it.” We must understand our roots. Because, in my opinion, there has never been a time in the history of the Republic when the greatest threat to “keeping it” comes from its leaders in government – especially the man holding the office once held by Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe.
Well, apparently they didn’t know enough to earn a passing grade – they correctly answered 54% of the history questions and 52% of the literature questions.
Three-quarters of the students did not know when Lincoln was president; one-third did not know what the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision was about; 70% could not identify the Magna Carta. One-third did not know that the phrase “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” comes from the Declaration of Independence; some attributed it to the Gettysburg Address.
Only 20% could identify James Joyce, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ralph Ellison, Joseph Conrad, or Henrik Ibsen, only one in three knew that Chaucer is the author of The Canterbury Tales; 65% did not know what 1984 or Lord of the Flies is about.
Almost 25 years later the Department of Education last week released the 2010 National Assessment of Educational Progress. Of the seven subjects on the national test, students performed the worst in U.S. history; only 13% of the 12,000 high school seniors can be considered “proficient” according to the standards of the test administrators. The test was also given to 7,000 fourth graders and 11,000 eighth graders.
Fewer than a quarter of the 12th-graders, for example, knew that China was North Korea's ally during the Korean War. The percentage of seniors considered proficient in 2010 has not changed since the last time the test was given – 2006. More than half of all seniors posted scores at the lowest achievement level, "below basic."
There is much to criticize in the National Assessment test. While sponsored at the federal level, it is administered by the states with state-to-state differences on the standards. Some of the questions have multiple choice answers, but others ask the students for a short “constructed” (essay) response, for example, to interpret the meaning of a World War II poster or give two reasons why George Washington was an important leader. These subjective answers must be graded by administrators to determine if they represent an adequate or inadequate answer – also requiring a subjective determination which is likely to vary from state to state.
Uniformity of standards is needed but the last place it should come from is the federal government. The federal government should never have been involved in a state’s educational system in the first place. Where is that authorized in the Constitution?
A frequent criticism of public education today is its political correctness and that revisionist history is being taught. In fact a controversy raged in Texas last year over the content of textbooks and the history curriculum. The current curriculum plays down the role of Thomas Jefferson among the founding fathers, despite being the author of the Declaration of Independence, the third US President, and the President responsible for the Louisiana Purchase. Texas Board of Education discussions ranged from whether President Reagan should get more attention (yes), whether hip-hop should be included as part of lessons on American culture (no), and whether President of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis's inaugural address should be studied alongside Abraham Lincoln's (yes).
A Board member who is a dentist by training, pushed through a change to the teaching of the civil rights movement to ensure that students also study the violent philosophy of the Black Panthers in addition to the nonviolent approach of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He further made sure that textbooks would mention the votes in Congress on civil rights legislation, which Republicans supported and many Democrats opposed.
Another Board member won approval for an amendment saying students should study “the unintended consequences” of the Great Society legislation, affirmative action, and Title IX legislation. He further won approval for an amendment stressing that Germans and Italians as well as Japanese were interned in the US during World War II, to counter the idea that the internment of Japanese was motivated by racism.
History revisionists around the country howled that the Texas Board members were unqualified to specify a history curriculum because they weren’t historians. Well, yes. However, I’m not trained in animal husbandry, but I can tell the difference between horse hockey and cow pies. I think the Texas Board is qualified to distinguish history from historical horse hockey.
Keep in mind that the revisionists wrote the textbooks and suggested what and how the curriculum would be taught. Texas is one of the two largest textbook buyers in the nation. Publishers will now have to comply with the Board’s requirements in order to sell in that state, which means the Texas decisions will influence how history will be taught in other states as well, because publishers can’t afford a Texas text and different texts for other states.
In his American Interest blog this week, Walter Russell Mead noted that when it comes to excellence in education, red states rule – at least according to a panel of experts assembled by Newsweek. Using a set of indicators ranging from graduation rates to college admissions and SAT scores, the panel reviewed data from high schools all over the country to find the best public schools in the country.
The results make depressing reading for teacher unions because the very best public high schools in the country are heavily concentrated in conservative red states.
Three of the nation’s ten best public high schools are in Texas – the no-income tax, right-to-work state that blue model defenders like to characterize as America at its worst. Florida, another no-income tax, right-to-work state long misgoverned by the evil and rapacious Bush dynasty, has two of the top ten schools, Mead notes.
Newsweek isn’t alone with these shocking results. Another top public school list, compiled by the Washington Post, no friend of conservative causes, was issued in May. Texas and Florida rank number one and number two on that list’s top ten as well.
Evidence of revisionism and political correctness comes through in the National Assessment – in the multiple choice and constructed response questions – samples of which are available online. One has to wonder why the NAEP won’t put the entire question set online.
A past assessment asked fourth-graders to identify the document “that contains the basic rules used to run the United States government.” The choices are the Declaration of Independence, the Magna Carta, the Mayflower Compact, and the Constitution. The best answer is, of course, the Constitution, but the question is wrong. Characterizing the US Constitution as “rules to run the government,” even though asked of 10-year olds in the fourth grade, shows how clueless the test designer is. The Constitution is a document that states the limits on the powers of the federal government by explicating what it can’t do and enumerating the few things it can do. That hardly amounts to “rules to run the government.”
Other questions and answers characterize our form of governance as a democracy, which it isn’t; we have a constitutional republic. The two are about as similar as a cat and a dog. Both have four legs but that’s where their likeness ends.
Despite the failings of the NAEP, there can be little doubt that the average American either never received or has forgotten even the minimal level of education required to be a responsible citizen.
Another national survey, this one sponsored by the Bill of Rights Institute, was conducted by Harris Interactive between December 1 and 3, 2010. It revealed a level of ignorance that is lampooned by Jay Leno’s “Man on the Street” interviews. American adults selected the correct answer 32% of the time, on average, on questions about the Bill of Rights, the freedoms it protects, and American government. An embarrassing 42% of the adults surveyed incorrectly chose one of America’s founding documents as the source of the phrase, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs," – which, of course, is the foundational statement of communism articulated by Karl Marx. Of all their incorrect choices, the most frequent incorrect choice was the Bill of Rights.
It’s important for every citizen to understand how America works. Our government derives its powers from the people, not the other way around. Yet, Janet Reno, Clinton’s Attorney General, once told a group of federal law enforcement officers “You are part of a government that has given its people more freedom … than any other government in the history of the world.” This Constitutional Neanderthal obviously didn’t understand the document she was sworn to defend! Within her second-rate mind there has always been a third-rate mind struggling to get out.
Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us, then, that the Harris Interactive survey showed 60% of Americans failed to recognize that a government whose powers derive from the people is something that makes this country exceptional. Perhaps it also ought not surprise us that congressmen fail to understand this, and when grilled by their constituents at town hall meetings, become incensed that they aren’t treated with more deference, calling loud but otherwise peaceful demonstrators Nazis.
In addition to the findings of NAEP and Harris Interactive, we have yet another survey, this one sponsored by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), which commissioned the Roper Center in 2000 to survey seniors at the nation’s best colleges and universities as identified by the U.S. News & World Report’s annual college rankings. Remember, now, that these were college seniors enrolled in supposedly the best 55 schools in the country. They were asked questions from a basic high school history curriculum. Four out of five or 81% of seniors from the top colleges/universities received a grade of D or F based on their answers.
Slightly more than half possessed a passable knowledge of American democracy and the Constitution. Only 34% identified George Washington as the American Commanding General at the battle of Yorktown, the last battle of the American Revolution. More of them (37%) thought Ulysses S. Grant was in charge. He would command the Union Army in the Civil War 80 years later.
Only 42% were able to identify George Washington as “First in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen.” Only 23% correctly identified James Madison as the “father of the Constitution. Most thought it was Jefferson, who was in Paris when the Constitutional Convention was in process.
Only 22% were able to identify the phrase “Government of the people, by the people, and for the people” as a line from the Gettysburg Address; 43% put it in the Declaration of Independence.
Over one-third were unable to identify the US Constitution as establishing the division of power in American government.
Yet 99% knew who Beavis and Butthead were, and 98% knew that Snoop Doggy Dogg was a rap singer. Is this what parents get for an annual tuition that costs up to $50,000?
The future and the defense of the American system are dependent on an educated citizenry. Yet the ACTA survey found that students can graduate from every one of the top 55 colleges and universities in the land without taking a single course in US history. If knowledge of history isn’t required to graduate from college, it will eventually no longer be a requirement for K-12. Then where will we be as a nation?
Thomas Jefferson said “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be.” We are losing our collective memory by not knowing history and with it we lose all that history encompasses to explain what happened that got us where we are.
Why study history? What good is its knowledge? What value is there in knowing the cause and consequences of the Salem witch hunts? Why ask the reason that cities are located where they are – any city? Does it make any difference in our lives to know the causes of the American Civil War? How about the English Civil War? Can today’s conflict between Islam and the West be explained by anything that happened in the past?
Why indeed? Because history lovers are curious people. Voltaire's desire was "… to know what were the steps by which men passed from barbarism to civilization."
Will and Ariel Durant took 50 years – most of their 68 years as husband and wife – to write one history book: their magisterial oeuvre, The Story of Civilization, which was published in 11 volumes. Will Durant had initially planned to write a history of the 19th century. But as he started working on it he found that his subject couldn’t be understood without the knowledge of what had come before. His search for a starting point gradually led him to begin with the pre-Sumerians and to write a history of all civilization, ancient and modern, Occidental and Oriental. As he explained in the preface of a later volume, “The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for our understanding.”
Durant’s conclusion is a succinct rationale for studying and understanding history. If we see humankind as an evolving and connected society, we can’t understand who we are until we understand who we were. And if we have no interest in who we were, it’s hard to understand why it matters who we are. Why then should we be willing to spend blood and treasure to defend a way of life that is rootless – that has no legacy worth protecting? Why would future generations have any interest in our accomplishments?
One premise of our democratic society, which Jefferson recognized over two centuries ago, is that for it to succeed, all of its members must have a sufficient grasp of history and current affairs to "… enable every man to judge for himself what will secure or endanger his freedom." I believe that premise has never been more true than it is today.
At the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, a woman asked Benjamin Franklin what kind of government the Founders had given them. “A Republic, madam,” said Dr. Franklin, “if you can keep it.” We must understand our roots. Because, in my opinion, there has never been a time in the history of the Republic when the greatest threat to “keeping it” comes from its leaders in government – especially the man holding the office once held by Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe.
Bill, I just started reading your blog and find it extremely interesting and thought-provoking.
ReplyDeleteIn regards to education in general, not just history, I thought for sure I knew all the answers after watching, "Waiting for Superman"; that is, until I discussed this with my friend Dr. Seda who is the chair of secondary mathematics for Fulton County Schools. Dr. Seda contends that the primary issue, at least in Fulton County, is that teachers are dictated to by the administration but then never supported. I get regular coaching from my manager at work but teachers are isolated, not empowered and worst of all, never really audited for performance. Dr. Seda believes that if teachers were monitored and then corrected/coached on areas for improvement, it would go a long way to helping our children learn.
Lastly, my quote of the week to be shared with friends is your line about animal husbandry..