In a 60-question multiple-choice quiz, "college seniors failed the civic literacy exam, with an average score of 53.2 percent, or F, on a traditional grading scale." And at many schools "seniors know less than freshmen about America's history, government, foreign affairs, and economy."
The schools with the worst records, the Journal notes, include some of the top-ranked colleges in the nation:
Cornell, UC Berkeley and Johns Hopkins were the worst three, their seniors scoring between 3.3 and 7.3 percentage points worse than their freshmen. A[lso] on the negative list were some other very prestigious universities: Williams, Georgetown, Yale, Duke and Brown.
The Journal, citing a report from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute ("ISI"), recommended that universities "must improve the quantity and quality of their teaching" in this area.
ISI concludes that "students don't learn what colleges don't teach." In other words, in colleges where students must take more courses in American history they do better on the test, outperforming schools where fewer courses were completed. Seniors at the top test-scoring colleges "took an average of 4.2 history and political science courses, while seniors at the two lowest-ranked colleges . . . took an average of 2.9 history and political science courses." Similarly, higher ranked colleges spent more time on homework, 20 hours a week at fourth-ranked Grove City College and 14 or 15 at low-ranked [universities]"
I have to wonder whether an anti-American or liberal bias at some of these colleges might have also contributed to the decline in scores.
For example, Cornell, one of the lowest scoring schools, also has one of the lowest percentages of conservative faculty members, according to the September 2002 issue of American Enterprise. The possibility that the scores may be tied to liberal bias may also be supported by the areas where students tested better:
More than 80% of students could identify Franklin D. Roosevelt's programs as the New Deal, 79% knew that Brown v. Board of Education ordered an end to racial segregation
Certainly those are important parts of history but they aren't the only aspects of it. They are, however, well known as touchstones of the left's view of history.<
