Historical Progress?

Campus Report ^ | July 18, 2008 | Bethany Stotts

[bs9021]

Historical Progress?

by: Bethany Stotts, July 18, 2008

Despite what Americans have been hearing about the nation’s poor civics literacy, renowned education reformer Diane Ravitch suggests that, on historical subjects at least, civics education may have made “some headway.” She writes in the summer edition of Hoover Digest,

“Yet compare [the results of two 1986 and 2007 surveys] I did, and it appears to me that those interviewed in the [Common Core] telephone sample of 2007 were somewhat better informed than their parent’s generation of 1986...On most questions of a factual nature, the proportion who answered correctly was either higher or the same, seldom lower.”

“So perhaps the pressure to improve history education during the past twenty years has made some headway,” she concludes. Ravitch is co-chair at the non-profit Common Core (CC), which surveyed 12,000 17-year-olds this January.

Among the examples of improvement that Ravitch highlights are

• an 11% increase in the respondents correctly dating the Civil War

• a 7% increase in individuals who can explain the outcome of Brown v. Board of Education.

A look at the 2008 CC study results finds that 75% to 97% of 17-year-olds could correctly identify the following historical events and people (descending order):

• Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech
• The attack on Pearl Harbor’s role in World War II
• Thomas Jefferson as the primary author of the Declaration of Independence
• Plato and Aristotle were Greek Philosophers
• President Abraham Lincoln wrote the Emancipation Proclamation
• Germany and Japan were America’s major enemies in WWII...

[ModelBreaker]

Wow. That's a high bar!

In addition, the there's a 90% increase in the number of little buggers know that after the United States discovered the Americas, they enslaved noble indians, used needles to inoculate the indians with AIDS, destroyed the pristine environment, and caused every bad thing that has ever happened in the world to happen. And, George Washington had slaves.

[Libertarianize the GOP]

As some one from the older generation who just went back to college, there are some things students can recite back but far too much of it is garbage that they are incapable or unwilling to challenge, even when the evidence contradicts what they believe and/or are taught.