♪Don't Know Much About History....♪

Sam Cooke's anthem to adolescent bliss (cousin to ignorance) is confirmed by Thomas C. Reeves. Plus, the United States has a president whose life exemplifies ignorance of history and all that other boring stuff. If this is (fair & balanced) elitism, so be it.

[x History News Network]
How Little the Public Knows About History
by Thomas C. Reeves

In early March, the University of Pennsylvania’s National Annenberg Election Survey discovered that only 43 percent of 634 adults questioned could correctly identify President Herbert Hoover. Twelve percent confused him with long-time FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Four percent linked his name to Hoover Dam in Nevada. Three percent associated the former Chief Executive with a brand of vacuum cleaner. Among those closest to their school years, aged 18 to 29, only 38 percent could identify Hoover in a political context.

The same survey discovered that only one out of five could connect actress Jane Fonda with the Vietnam War. (So calling John Kerry “Hanoi John” is obviously falling on deaf ears.) Nine percent of those surveyed connected Fonda to her exercise videos. Seventeen percent gave no answer at all.

There was some huffing and puffing about these findings in the elite media. But as one who taught in colleges with open door admission policies for more than three decades, I yawned at the survey. Nothing new here.

I discovered over the years that in survey classes freshmen and sophomores knew virtually nothing of the past, even the history of their own country. Their knowledge of current events was almost as dim. They were not alone. Historian Paul Gagnon of the University of Massachusetts recently reported, “Secondary and college students, and indeed most of the rest of us, have only a feeble grasp of politics and a vague awareness of history, especially the political history of the United States and the world.” Studies of eighth-graders and seniors at fifty top colleges and universities reveal appalling ignorance. The new book Deliberation Day, by Bruce Ackerman and James S. Fishkin, concludes, “If six decades of modern public opinion research establish anything, it is that the general public’s political ignorance is appalling.”

For more than two decades, I gave a survey lecture on the meaning of Left and Right, telling students that this was vital knowledge in understanding the recent past and contemporary affairs. After explaining the basic differences for some 45 minutes, I would ask the class to submit names of famous people in our own time in order to place them on the ideological scale. Inevitably, there was silence. No one could think of anyone famous, outside of show business, except the president. Class discussion at this academic level was extraordinarily difficult to evoke.

Even worse, the vast majority of the young people in class had no desire to learn. Their approach to the survey course was quite simple: Tell me how much of this junk I have to memorize in order to pass. Linking the past to the present, one of the historian’s most valuable contributions, proved fruitless as virtually no one cared about either the past or present. What mattered was getting a degree, your ticket to the middle class, that indispensable sheet of paper that made you manager of the local MacDonald’s rather than just a lackey who asks if you want fries with the order. If the survey class involved any appreciable reading assignments, they either were ignored or students disappeared, often without even dropping the course. By the dawn of this century, my survey students were openly refusing to read even a single book.

The upper division history majors proved little better. They had seemingly forgotten almost everything they were supposed to learn in the survey courses. President Zachary who? Was McKinley before or after Coolidge? The New Deal was in the Thirties, right? They had firm opinions, of course, largely echoing the line virtually all of their professors had given them about sexism, racism, homophobia, and the like. But facts? Forget it. One senior told me, “I don’t do dates.”

One year, late in my career, I managed to fight through faculty roadblocks and offered a course in the history of American religion. I spent the entire semester explaining the most basic Sunday School terminology. Religion was something wholly outside student experience and of little serious interest. New Age was as foreign to them as Puritanism, Vatican II as strange as the Reformation.

On religion and the American public, see George Gallup, Jr. and Jim Castelli, The People’s Religion: American Faith in the 90’s, and One Nation Under God: Religion in Contemporary American Society by Barry A. Kosmin and Seymour P. Lachman. The former book documents “a nation of biblical illiterates.” Only four in ten Americans know that Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount. Three in ten teenagers do not know why Easter is celebrated. Fewer than half of all adults can name the four Gospels of the New Testament.

For those who seek to consult the public on matters of grave importance to the nation, I suggest that they try to learn what it means to be an average American. Watch some prime time television. Spend a week in a local high school. Glean the topics of conversation in bars and barber shops. Visit a class in Mass Communications at the average college. (Of more than 4,000 institutions of higher education in America, only a couple of hundred, at most, have high admission standards). Find out what most people depend upon for their information. See how many people can correctly date World War II, give the population of the city they live in, or tell you where their grandmother was born. And then read the results of those polls that ask about the seriousness of global warming, America’s internationalist perspective, the image of France, proper levels of U.S. defense spending, and Richard Clarke’s testimony on counterterrorism. To judge American foreign policy, you should at least be able to identify the Secretary of State and locate Iraq on a map. How many can?

The above is not a general statement about public virtues, of which there are many. It is not a reflection upon the futility of democracy, for no system is preferable. This is a statement of fact about public knowledge. Let us not pretend that most people know more than they actually do. Politicians and media leaders, for example, should be less eager to whip out the latest public opinion poll about the role of America in the Middle East, because most of those polled surely could not accurately define the Middle East or give you a cogent sentence about Islam. This commentary is not about snobbery. It’s about reality.

Thomas C. Reeves is the author of A Question of Character: A Life of John F. Kennedy. His latest book is America's Bishop: The Life and Times of Fulton J. Sheen (Encounter 2001). He's a Senior Fellow of the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute.

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