Can you, without peeking at a textbook or doing a quick Google search, say roughly when Abraham Lincoln was elected president? Could you name which country the United States sparred with during the Cold War? Do you know where the phrase “all men are created equal” comes from?
If so, congratulations. Turns out you’re smarter than many college students.
For the second straight year, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute has given university students a 60-question, multiple-choice civics test. These exams represent the first nationwide attempts to determine what the students know about American history and culture. And this year’s report is as sobering as last year’s was.
“The overall average score for the approximately 7,000 seniors who took the American civic literacy exam was 54.2 percent, an F,” the report says. And at some leading schools, seniors scored worse than freshmen. “Students apparently ‘unlearned’ what they once knew,” the report says, a chilling example of “negative learning.”
And as the examples above indicate, the ISI test is hardly a graduate-level exam. You don’t need to be class valedictorian, for example, to identify the “series of government programs” that President Franklin Roosevelt proposed as “the New Deal” and not as “supply-side economics.”
Why does this matter?
Well, you can’t build a house (or a bridge or a skyscraper) without a solid foundation. Until a student has mastered the basics of American history, such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, that student won’t be able to understand the Civil War, the New Deal or, for that matter, the division of powers in today’s federal government.
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