A recent national survey found that a majority of elementary, junior high, and high school students couldn’t answer basic questions about American history, like why Abraham Lincoln was such an important historical figure.
Via the NYTimes:
Diane Ravitch, an education historian who was invited by the national assessment’s governing board to review the results, said she was particularly disturbed by the fact that only 2 percent of 12th graders correctly answered a question concerning Brown v. Board of Education, which she called “very likely the most important decision” of the United States Supreme Court in the past seven decades.
Students were given an excerpt including the passage, “We conclude that in the field of public education, separate but equal has no place, separate educational facilities are inherently unequal,” and were asked what social problem the 1954 ruling was supposed to correct.
“The answer was right in front of them,” Ms. Ravitch said. “This is alarming.”
Historians are blaming Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act, which put an educational focus on improving reading and math scores above other subjects. Still, I didn’t think anyone—not even children—could make Sarah Palin’s warped grasp of American history look masterful.
do you have to mention her in every posting?
Well, yeah, but they can text-message naked pictures of themselves to 87 people in five minutes. Can you do that?
Welcome to my hell.
If I had kids I’d be terrified that I would have to compensate for an underfunded and undervalued education system…and work 2 jobs to feed said kids.
But…you know…DON’T RAISE TAXES.
This is no mistake. The right wing has done everything it can to starve education budgets. And it’s only the right wing that benefits from an ignorant public.
There’s two simple reasons that we have a collapsing educational system in this kuntree: Corporations need ignorant, mindless consumers who never realize that their products are making them stupid, fat and broke, and politicians need ignorant, mindless voters who never realize they’re voting against their interests and getting focked six ways from Sunday.
I know that the 2nd amendment says I can keep my assault rifle in my lap while I’m driving, and that’s all the history I need. It’s Elites like you who are ruining this country for the rest of us.
This is alarming. Read to your kids!
Man, you guys are way off. You can blame the right all you want (large class sizes certainly don’t help) but the reality in the classroom is the pronounced lack of intellectual curiosity and disengaged parents. And goddamn are kids lazy.
The fact is that the average American is somewhat dumb and lazy. This, I assure you, is not a new development.
Rotten666 has it right.
How many adults could talk about American history coherently, without appealing to mythology? Are we disappointed that they don’t know history or that they don’t believe in the same historical myths that we do?
I found this to be depressing when I read it a couple days ago.
While endlessly shrinking budgets are partly to blame, I mostly agree with Rotten666 (who is a teacher, I presume). The questions on the test appeared to be looking for the baseline knowledge of American history and just a little critical thinking, and after 12 years of even mediocre schooling most kids should have some of this knowledge. Our society as a whole does not appear to value education any longer. We don’t care about education, so we don’t scream in outrage when politicians slash its budget.
Everything I know about history I learned after I graduated high school. They did a pretty shitty job of teaching it even way back when dinosaurs ruled the Earth.
We reached our limit with the crapfest of public education this past year. And behold! When you pony up $25,000 for private school 8th grade the clock is magically turned back to when we were kids and there was this thing called a complete education.
It won’t be long now before we are a country of feudal lords living in castles surrounded by everyone else living in grass huts.
@2 – I only sexted to 46 people in five minutes… My performance is dismal.
@11 – I don’t remember any critical thinking being taught in school until college. High school and below was just memorization… And I don’t think I got stuck at one bad school because we moved a lot and I attended about 9 different schools…
Is there historical data to compare this number to? Is 2 percent less than the number of kids who could identify that passage 10,20, 30 years ago? Has that number been adjusted for social, racial, economic, and language disparities, which are changing all the time?
I’ve been hearing this kind of “kids R dumb” stuff forever. Some continuity would be interesting to see.
It’s also unclear to me that NCLB is to blame here. Modern educational methods are not always — how can I put this? — optimized for imparting concrete knowledge OR critical thinking, and high school history in my own experience never got as far as the Civil Rights Movement — we pretty much crapped out around WWII, or even WWI (I did a report on WWII in HS but that was a special project, not lesson-based).
@6 This. So much this. I could see the kids who cared about learning or not as soon as they walked in the door to the classroom. More importantly, these people will be able to vote, and won’t be swayed by sensible arguments, but sensationalist crap that makes good headlines.
Also, Sarah Palin has a college degree, albeit a rather weak one. Of course, few people learn anything about American History in college, either — and fewer do so every year. Liberal arts degrees of any kind are disappearing.
The weird thing here for me: if all this emphasis is being placed on reading, wouldn’t the kids have been able to exercise these great new reading comprehension skills and see that the answer is right there? Even if they hadn’t studied Brown vs. Board of Ed in history or civics?
A thousand years ago, I took “rocks for jocks” in college to meed a “basic and breadth” requirement. We were given weekly quizzes that were 90% of the grade. They were open book, multiple choice. I would answer the extra credit questions and wreck the curve. Completing these quizzes took about 15 minutes.
One confused guy asked me how I was doing so well. I said I looked up the questions in the index.
He said, “what’s an index?”
I don’t think you can blame schools for people who are so checked out that after 12 years of public education, an index is a new idea to them.
I haven’t conducted a national survey but in our school system certainly NCLB is to blame. I base that on my wife’s having lived here all her life and having witnessed the change in the schools she attended, and on the two of us being involved parents who talk to other parents and teachers. The state test is the teacher’s only scorecard.
By the way, private schools here don’t even use the state standardized test. If my son had stayed where he was he would definitely be left behind when college rolls around. He would be totally unprepared. As it is we are spending his college money on sending him to fucking middle school.
I don’t blame schools, or even the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy ™ for this…I agree with Rotten, it’s lack of intellectual curiosity, caused mostly by bad parental example. Their parents are intellectually lazy and undereducated, so what example do the kids have to seek education?
I *do* think the results of crippling our public educational system will be to return education to its pre-20th century version – wealthy people’s children will have access to education, and the working class will be expected to learn just enough to fill menial jobs…but I work in a public school district, and history is still being taught. It’s still being taught the same shitty way it was taught when I was in school back before the invention of dirt. Memorize dates and place names. None of the good stuff that caught my interest when I started learning about history on my own – you know, the juicy stuff like who was having sex with which King and how that affected politics.
I’ll bet everyone who failed that question had had at least one class that taught the answer to it already. They just didn’t retain the knowledge, because no one put it in a context that was relevant and interesting to them. Same way I was taught about the Spanish-American War. Did I know why it mattered? No. Did I fall asleep during one of the classes on it (which seemed to last longer than the war itself actually did)? Yes.
@9 I’m still thinking there’s some causation betwixt the fact that the Scandinavian countries spend a fuckton more on education and teacher training, and their kids outperforming ours by miles. There’s gotta be some lazy Scandinavian jokes to back me up on this.
@19 I think you’ve hit it there. I’ve yet to see a textbook that was all blank pages, filled with misspelled words, or had incorrect solutions to equations. Ditto for lesson plans. Material is being presented in learnable fashion, but it’s hard to engage a student if they want to stay checked out. There may be lots of reasons for that, but I’m pretty sure lack of effort from shitty teachers isn’t high on the list.
@15 — There is, but the media doesn’t like to report it, because it show a slow gradual improvement over decades, which runs counter to the script everyone from the Stranger to the National Review to “us old farts in general” follows on this topic.
Another question from the test asks what caused the US to enter WWI, I believe. How many of us can tackle that one? Or would argue with the correct conventional answer the test probably expects.
I believe their is an ancient Roman (you know preAmerican history) theory on this, something about Bread and Circuses (they may have used alternate spellings). When kids today get done memorizing how many nipples Carrie Underwood, Mark Wahlberg and Lily Allen have, and learn Justin Beiber dating theory and commit all of Lady Gaga’s lyrics to memory, is there really room for American History?
Further, noted historian and educator James Loewen has long theorized that our detachment to American history may stem from the fact that as it is taught in K-12 America, it is for the most part a bullshit field, full of rote memorization of dates out of context, lies and propaganda, and on overarching narrative of American Exceptionalism that does not jibe with the experiences of many of its students.
@15
I have some questions about that figure too.
When I think back to my senior class, I can’t imagine that less than 50% could give a clear description of the political and social conditions around Brown v Board.
I’ve haven’t been able to get the wording of the question, but I have a feeling that the sound byte provided doesn’t really describe what was asked.
@22,
Only one Scandinavian country spends more on education as percentage of GDP than we do. Iceland spends 7.98%. We spend 7.38%.
I blame your ignorance on our well-funded but still inept public schools.
@26,
I agree. My senior class had about 400 students. At least a quarter were ambitious enough to take AP/Honors classes and to apply to four-year universities. There’s no way they wouldn’t know what Brown was about, especially since we took U.S. history junior year.
I graduated 14 years ago. I’m skeptical that students are that much dumber today.
There’s a chicken-and-egg question here: Is the fact that authors like Glenn Beck are publishing the most widely-read books about “history” the cause of or the result of widespread American ignorance on the topic?
For what it’s worth, I share Kevin Drums view that, while American’s knowledge of history is obviously deficient, this New York Times article’s implication that there has been some sort of steady or recent decline is false.
http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/0…
Back in the day my sister was called into juvenile court for skipping school. My dad asked the judge why she should go to school to learn lies in history class. My father is Filipino, my siblings and I are Native American/Filipino. The judge sympathized with that assertion.
In highschool I knew what I was learning in botany and geology was actual facts about what takes place in the world. In history class I was dubious and therefore didn’t care to learn.
@27 Mind linking your sources? Not calling you a liar, I’d just like to check them out. I assumed countries that offered free tuition would spend a lot more on education.
The only reason to educate children is so they can read the Bible and measure in cubits…it is in the Constitution!
@32,
The Guardian published a chart two years ago.
There are obviously significant differences between those countries and ours. We don’t provide as many social services, for example. Danish kids also, in my experience, spend all day and almost all year in school and have no homework. But I’m still convinced that a significant reason why American kids do so badly is because they and their parents don’t value education.
@34 Thanks, keshmeshi.
@23 – A friend of mine went to high school in Sequim, WA in the early 90’s. Her history class was taught from a pamphlet. Not a textbook, a pamphlet. Just a few pages long. History. …fits in your pocket, I guess.
I’m going to hazard the guess that Sequim doesn’t have only school system in the country that diminishes History education in such a radical way. Creationism IS still being taught in plenty of schools across this land, and while that is upending Biology classes, I would be wholly surprised if History somehow escaped the same Xtian revisionist gaze.
This country is quite racist and classist still. People like to smooth it over and talk about some mythological “melting pot” where everyone somehow becomes homogeneously Brave and Free, but the reality is that there are distinct class stratifications –along racial and economic lines, primarily– which is perpetuated though education (or lack thereof) and family perspectives towards eduction. There also remains a strong anti-intellectual trend amongst the lower classes, which doesn’t help matters.
As the studies point out: Ignorant people don’t know they are ignorant, and forge ahead with whatever beliefs they hold. Smart people doubt whether they are smart, and don’t take action due to that uncertainty.
I’m about to bring up another meme and that’s the “Schools are more focused on socialization and self esteem than on education” one. I have 3 family members and an ex-boyfriend in education and all of them tell horror stories of students with extreme (behavioral/cognitive) issues grinding class to a halt in the name of inclusion. Budgets are cut for gifted and talented classes in order to pay for in-room special ed teachers for mainstreaming.
Call me an elitist, but how is this productive? Most of the research I’ve seen supporting these methods haven’t shown amazing strides in societal attitudes and definitely haven’t helped students as a whole become any more educated.
Don’t get me wrong. I also blame the parents who attack schools for suggesting their child might be less than perfect or manipulate the system to get their kids into “gifted” classes they don’t belong in or to attack teachers who suggest they need to help their child study. I also blame the right for underfunding education, attempting to siphon funds to private corporation, and for creating senseless mandates.
I think it’s a perfect storm of ideology over efficacy and all sides are to blame.
Clearly the solution is to abolish the Department of Education. The private sector can educate kids much more thoroughly!
@38: Pepsi?