There I was, feeling rather smug after reading through a new report about the woeful ignorance of teenagers. Large numbers of 17-year-olds, it appears, are clueless about important historical dates and utterly innocent of basic cultural references such as to Oedipus and Big Brother.
Children whose parents went to college tend to do better in such surveys, so I assumed that our own family’s teenager, a 13-year-old honors student, would do comparatively well.
So, naturally, right after school I ambushed the poor child. Who were Plato and Aristotle? What is Orwell’s novel “1984” about? What famous English poem did Geoffrey Chaucer write? My maternal conceit swelled as she answered each question correctly. She could tell me who wrote the Emancipation Proclamation, who was the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, and what the Renaissance was.
But in the way of these things — and in the way of American teenagers, it seems — my hubris was quickly followed by nemesis.
“When was World War I? I don’t know,” she faltered, “Maybe in the 1920s and ’30s?” Oh, man. I kept my face poker-straight and tried another tack.
“Martin Luther King gave the “I have a dream” speech,” she answered. “But the Civil War? Um, between 1800 and 1850?” Yikes!
And so it went on, through questions about whom Sen. Joe McCarthy investigated and why, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and what famous person said, “Ask not what your country can do for you.”
The survey that inspired my inquisition came out midweek from Common Core, a nonpartisan group that’s hoping to revive the so-called Excellence Movement in education.
Back in the 1980s, teachers and parents were all astir about reinforcing cultural literacy and augmenting the teaching of American history, in particular. “Excellence”was eventually eclipsed by the test-focused regime that predominates today, wherein schoolchildren are taught to perform on standardized tests more than they are to master interesting material.
That a smart eighth-grader should know about Harriet Tubman and Jim Crow and yet be unable to place the Civil War historically does indeed say a lot about the way modern schooling is letting children down.
For decades, American students have been taught history as if it consists of great dollops of activity detached from each other and floating around in space. Many adults will know the special embarrassment that comes when in conversation some garden-variety European turns out to know American history — dates, especially — better than they do.
Even sending one’s children to the most elite universities may not equip them with what I hope we’d all agree is fundamental knowledge. Last September, for instance, a survey of Harvard seniors revealed that slightly less than half knew that the sentence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” comes from the Declaration of Independence.
I suppose we can be cheered that 77 percent of older teenagers know that George Washington commanded the American army in the Revolutionary War. And the republic will not rise or fall over the fact that most teens don’t know the origin of the phrase “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Thanks to the miracle of Wikipedia, any adolescent who encounters a puzzling literary reference can lay it bare within a moment or two.
But some ignorance is deeper and more distressing. If you believe, as more than a quarter of 17-year-olds apparently do, that Columbus sailed the ocean blue after 1750, the origins of your own country and its traditions will be shrouded in confusion for you.
You won’t have any meaningful grasp of anything much to do with American or European history. It will all be a fuzz. Sure, the country may hum along perfectly well, but the impoverishment here is more personal than national. A shared literary and historical culture is every American child’s birthright. We should make sure they know it.
Examiner columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of the Wall Street Journal. Her Examiner column appears on Thursdays.
