NEWSFLASH: When it comes to knowledge of their nation’s history, American students are as dumb as rocks. The most recent confirmation of this perennial truth came last Thursday, when the Department of Education released the latest results from the U.S. History portion of the National Assessment of Education Progress. “Awful” and “abysmal” were just a few of the adjectives that education policy wonks tossed around when they heard the details. You can read the Washington Post’s account here; the full test, with results, is available here. If you’re a glutton for punishment, you can delve into all the depressing stats, helpfully categorized in almost every imaginable way (race, sex, socioeconomic status of the school, geographic region, private vs. public schools, etc.).
The woeful ignorance of American students regarding their nation’s history and politics is now so widely acknowledged that it’s even become a target for humor. You’ve probably seen the popular recurring feature on “The Tonight Show” where Jay Leno roams the streets and gets laughs by asking doltish citizens about history and current events. (My favorite such moment was when Leno showed some college kids a picture of Jimmy Carter–whom, of course, none could identify–and then, in an inspired bit of comic juxtaposition, showed them a picture of the Planter’s Peanut Man, whom they all immediately recognized.)
Still, one can laugh at this sort of thing only so much. Whenever these test results make the news, they become immediate fodder for fuddy-duddy op-ed writers, who earnestly trot out warmed-over invocations of Santayana’s famous dictum that those who cannot remember history are condemned to repeat it. Since I’m writing this column, you can consider me a card-carrying fuddy-duddy.
What’s notable about this latest evidence of our national amnesia is the befuddlement of education officials, who expected to see improvement this time around because of the nationwide spread of history standards. As the Post story indicates, “The number of states with history standards increased from 20 to 46 during the 1990s. . . . But the NAEP results showed no significant difference in test performance between students whose teachers reported adhering closely to content standards and those in classes with no such guidelines. Asked to explain, [Secretary of Education Rod] Paige said: ‘I don’t have any explanation for that at all.'”
Perhaps our Secretary of Education would do well to read an excellent, damning piece by Kay Hymowitz that appeared in our own magazine a couple of weeks ago. Hymowitz reports on the chicanery of the National Council for Social Studies, a 26,000-member organization of teachers of history, geography, political science, economics, and other similar subjects. As Hymowitz details, the NCSS is (surprise, surprise) run by ideologues who have other things in mind besides teaching our students the essentials about their nation’s history–namely, the agenda of the multicultural left. Here’s her take on the problem with the NCSS-inspired “standards” that most state education establishments have adopted:
“Take a look at ‘Expectations of Excellence,’ [NCSS’s] 1994 curriculum standards for social studies, widely followed by education authorities as they draft state standards and curricula around the country. ‘Thomas Jefferson, among others, emphasized that the vitality of a democracy depends upon the education and participation of its citizens,’ this statement begins promisingly. But what follows is a yawning list of ‘performance expectations,’ ranging from the obscure to the impenetrable, about culture, economics, technology, ‘continuity and change,’ and personal identity, that includes no American history, no major documents, and only a smattering of references to government at all.
“Such references as there are to government–‘Describe how public policies are used to address issues of public concern,’ for example–exist in some hazy realm of ur-citizenship that could apply to the Democratic Republic of Korea as easily as to our own. While it’s true that high school students are expected to be able to ‘explain the origins and continuing influence of key ideals of the democratic republican form of government, such as human dignity, liberty, justice, equality, and the rule of law,’ this task is 78th in a series of 87, given no more salience than such pressing civic goals as knowing how to ‘construct reasoned judgments about specific cultural responses to persistent human issues’ or how to ‘analyze the role of perceptions, attitudes, values, and beliefs in the development of personal identity.'”
As bleak as all this may seem, a little perspective is in order, as always. Ignorance, after all, is not a trait new to the human condition. My guess is that if you’d given similar tests to students, say, 100 years ago, the results wouldn’t have been much better. (If anyone out there has any data on this, I’d love to see it.) And perhaps interest in history is only something that develops later in life, when the charms of Nintendo and teen boy-bands lose their appeal. After all, someone is buying all those best-selling books about the Founding Fathers, Teddy Roosevelt, the “Greatest Generation,” and the Civil War.
And on a brighter note, apparently some in the Bush administration see an opportunity in the wake of September 11 to reinvigorate civics education in America, as this story in yesterday’s Washington Post reveals. Let’s hope the Bushies are serious about it. Indeed, a sense of national crisis can be a spur for positive education reform; recall, for example, the largely successful effort to improve American students’ achievement in math and science after the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957. Maybe recent events will similarly motivate us to redouble our efforts to teach American children what their country is about–what our young men and women in uniform are fighting for in Shah-i-Khot and, perhaps soon, Baghdad. After all, it would be a shame if students taking the NAEP history test 50 years from now were shown a picture of a 757 slamming into the World Trade Center, and couldn’t say what the picture means.
Lee Bockhorn is associate editor at The Weekly Standard.
