He's right. This week, the Department of Education released the 2010 National Assessment of Educational Progress, which found that only 12% of high-school seniors have a firm grasp of our nation's history. And consider: Just 2% of those students understand the significance of Brown v. Board of Education.
Mr. McCullough began worrying about the history gap some 20 years ago, when a college sophomore approached him after an appearance at "a very good university in the Midwest." She thanked him for coming and admitted, "Until I heard your talk this morning, I never realized the original 13 colonies were all on the East Coast." Remembering the incident, Mr. McCullough's snow-white eyebrows curl in pain. "I thought, 'What have we been doing so wrong that this obviously bright young woman could get this far and not know that?'
......."History is a source of strength," he says. "It sets higher standards for all of us." But helping to ensure that the next generation measures up, he says, will be a daunting task.
One problem is personnel. "People who come out of college with a degree in education and not a degree in a subject are severely handicapped in their capacity to teach effectively," Mr. McCullough argues. "Because they're often assigned to teach subjects about which they know little or nothing." The great teachers love what they're teaching, he says, and "you can't love something you don't know anymore than you can love someone you don't know."
Another problem is method. "History is often taught in categorieswomen's history, African American history, environmental historyso that many of the students have no sense of chronology. They have no idea what followed what."........
Some argue that these changes are benign. Many children who in the past would have had two married parents could have two cohabiting parents instead. Why should the lack of a legal or religious tie affect anyones well-being?
There are three reasons to be concerned about this dramatic shift in family life.".......
This is troubling but it is not news to me, I have become aware in the past ten years just how little real education is represented by the “sheepskins” that have become so common. I have spoken to recent graduates of our local university who have majored in history and found them about as well qualified in history as I am in nuclear physics or brain surgery. I would estimate that the average eighth grade dropout of sixty years ago knew far more about history than these history majors with their bachelor degrees. I have been told many times in the past that a history degree is worthless unless you intend to teach history but based on what I now know it would seem that TEACHING HISTORY is one of the things for which these graduates are LEAST qualified. They would struggle to pass a fifth grade history test from my era.