Gaps in Student Knowledge Found : Deficiencies in History and Literature Reported in Survey

American schools are producing students with “startling gaps in knowledge” of history and literature, teaching them how to think without giving them anything to think about, the National Endowment for the Humanities charged Sunday.

The endowment said 68% of high school students questioned in a new survey could not place the Civil War within the correct half-century.

The survey of nearly 8,000 17-year-olds found that 43% could not place World War I in the correct half-century, 39% could not do the same for the writing of the U.S. Constitution and nearly a third placed the date of Columbus’ discovery of the New World after 1750.

The survey, parts of which were announced by the NEH before the scheduled release date next month, also found students ignorant of major literary figures.

Emphasis on Skills

In a report critical of the nation’s elementary and secondary schools, endowment Chairman Lynne V. Cheney blamed the poor state of humanities education on several factors, including a curriculum that emphasizes skills over knowledge, a system of teacher training that stresses teaching methods over subject matter and textbooks that have become “an overcrowded flea market of disconnected facts.”

“Usually the culprit is ‘process’--the belief that we can teach our children how to think without troubling them to learn anything worth thinking about,” Cheney wrote. “In our schools today we run the danger of unwittingly proscribing our own heritage.”

The report recommended fundamental changes, including an end to the widespread system of teacher certification based on completion of college-based training programs and a move away from textbook selection committees and the heavy reliance on textbooks in the classroom.

The harsh message in “American Memory: A Report on the Humanities in the Nation’s Public Schools” follows several years of a national education reform movement that brought more rigorous course requirements and basic skills tests for students but dealt little with the content of courses.

‘Reform Was in the Air’

“Educational reform was in the air, but the humanities were seldom a part of it,” Cheney wrote.

She urged that schools restructure their curricula, concentrating more on meaningful subject matter and less on skills. While both are important, she said, schools have neglected content by overemphasizing the process of learning and skills varying from drawing conclusions and predicting outcomes to filling in forms.

“Perhaps the most obvious indicator of how process-driven our schools have become is the dominant role played by the Scholastic Aptitude Test,” the report said. “Looming over our educational landscape is an examination that, in its verbal component, carefully avoids assessing substantive knowledge. . . . Whether test-takers have studied the Civil War, learned about Magna Carta or read ‘Macbeth’ are matters to which the SAT is studiously indifferent.”

The NEH report, mandated by Congress and written by Cheney, was based on contributions of more than three dozen experts, including Daniel J. Boorstin, outgoing librarian of Congress; Prof. Diane Ravitch of the Columbia University Teachers College, who co-authored the survey of 17-year-olds, and Prof. E. D. Hirsch of the University of Virginia, author of a recent book recommending that schools teach a core of basic facts and concepts to improve what he calls “cultural literacy.”

Survey of 17-Year-Olds

Cheney relied on the results of the NEH-financed survey of 17-year-olds, 80% of whom were enrolled in an American history course in the spring of 1986, when they took the multiple-choice test.

The students’ lack of knowledge about literature was equally disturbing, the NEH said, reporting that 84% could not identify Fyodor Dostoevsky as the author of “Crime and Punishment” and 67% could not say in what region of the country William Faulkner set his novels.

Nearly two-thirds could not identify Geoffrey Chaucer as author of “The Canterbury Tales,” 60% could not name Walt Whitman as the American poet who wrote “Leaves of Grass” and most were unfamiliar with classics written by Dante, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Jane Austen.

The report recommends that educational institutions and states discard long-held practices of teacher certification and adopt a system in which certification is granted by an independent body, as it is for doctors and lawyers.

Today many states accept completion of an accredited college education program as evidence that a prospective teacher is eligible for certification. That leaves the certification in the hands of those who educate the teacher, resulting in what Cheney calls a “conflict of interest.”