Failing American history
TODAY'S EDITORIAL
October 14, 2006


The Intercollegiate Studies Institute recently conducted a national survey to find what colleges and universities are teaching students about American history. The report, published Sept. 26, is titled "The Coming Crisis in Citizenship: Higher Education's Failure to Teach America's History and Institutions" -- an unfortunate and alarmingly accurate name. ISI randomly selected more than 14,000 freshmen and seniors from 50 colleges to take a 60-question civic literacy survey which covered four subjects: 1) American history; 2) government; 3) American and the world; and 4) market economy. The results speak for themselves -- a crisis, indeed.
The study shows that American colleges and universities do not increase students' civic knowledge. The average score for seniors on the exam was 53.2 percent -- an F by most grading scales, and only 1.5 percent higher than their freshmen counterparts. At several schools, seniors scored lower than the freshmen -- what the ISI referred to as "negative learning." In other words, "seniors apparently forgot what is known by their freshman peers or -- more ominously -- were mistaught by their professors."
The study also shows that more prestige does not translate into better academics. ISI ranks schools based on the improvement of scores from freshman to senior. Students at elite schools performed significantly worse than those at non-elite schools; the highest-ranked Ivy League school in the study is Princeton, which comes in at number 18; Harvard ranks 25th. The schools with high rankings in the U.S. News and World Report ranked lowest in the ISI study, the worst scores coming from Cornell University, the University of California-Berkeley and Johns Hopkins University, with learning scores of -3.3, -5.6 and -7.3 respectively. This represents negative learning from freshman to senior year.
Another major finding was that schools "where students took or were required to take more courses related to America's history and institutions outperformed those schools where fewer courses were completed." At ISI's highest-ranked school, Rhodes College, students took an average of 6.72 survey-related courses. At Johns Hopkins, the average was less than 4. Students at the schools which scored highest were more likely to vote, participate in community service and get involved in politics.
It is disheartening that more than half of the seniors did not know when the first American colony was established or that the Bill of Rights prohibits an official religion of the United States. College students need to take more American history, and the quality of these courses needs drastic improvement.

Failing American history - Editorials/Op-Ed - The Washington Times, America's Newspaper

Thus, once more proving my point.....educated dummies.

As a History major, it really upsets me to see how little people care about where they came from. It also allows us to understand our society and why we act the way we do on the global scale. I am taking two History classes this semester; one of them is US History Since 1877 and the other being Western Civilization I. It's really sad to hear students talk about how they don't even care about History and that they're only taking the class to fulfill their Gen. Ed. requirement. When you ask a person living even twenty years ago a question regarding their country (or any other for that matter)'s history, then can conjure up enough knowledge to answer. Nowadays, it's pathetic to hear the responses I get. "What's the Holocaust ?"

This begs the question: what are the graduation requirements at America's colleges and universities?

I have absolutely no idea. Personally, I think Gen. Ed.'s are stupid. I passed the International Baccalauareate so I basically never need to do Maths or Sciences ever again to become a History professor (my goal). The problem is, if we take Gen. Ed.'s away from US colleges, students won't give a shit about classes they don't need for their majors. It's not like in Europe where we get drilled a load of historical facts into our heads from 1st year of school to the time we reach college. In the US, history courses aren't as developed...unfortunately. And what the hell is "Social Studies" ?

One of the major problems is that a history course is not always required by the General Education requirements.

dmk

I thought for sure Dylan would have responded by now. He is always calling my stupid for calling college professors "educated dummies" and my lack of respect for a college education at an Ivy League mausoleum.

I know the topic is higher education and history, but it occurs to me that not everyone goes to college, or delays going to college, so perhaps we should be looking at high schools, too.

My little sister didn't know who won the Civil war, or who was in it for that matter. The younger generation (Including mine) are completely oblivious to the importance of history. All I ever heard in History class was, "Why do we need history, it doesn't matter to me what happened in the past". And it really bothers me. I love history, I found it fascinating. I was a history major until I decided to join the military. I had a friend up 'till a couple of days ago didn't even know who the vice president was. It's really sad.

If you don't know history, you're doomed to repeat it. I think some famous guy said that, but I can't remember his name.

The best we can do is correlate the "freshmen" in this study to an approximate to what "high school seniors" would be like. I think studies on high schools and history have shown similar abysmal results.
And in addition, I can't help but think that maybe high school should be the best place for these issues. Isn't college supposed to be a more specialized approach into areas like engineering, pre-med, pre-law, architecture, etc...

But on this specific subject of colleges, not all curriculums require history, government, or international relations classes. Economics I believe is a different matter which is more required.
I got my b.s. in engineering, and never had to take any history, government, or international relations class. I took one economics class.

As I graduated high school, I learned that it was becoming a new trend for colleges to give more credence to foreign language education, and that possibly in the future high schools might require it for college acceptance, or give more weight to those that had it.

Regardless, we could probably look up a variety of curricula and see how many non-"Arts&Sciences" degrees require specific history, government, or international relations classes. I wouldn't be surprised if some degree course-work, such as engineering as a group, just had "electives" with nothing more.