Ignorance Is No Bliss
The latest evidence describing the cultural ignorance of many college students is presented in a Gallup Poll commissioned by the National Endowment for the Humanities. A majority of the 696 seniors at 67 colleges who were asked couldn’t identify Magna Carta or name the author of “The Tempest.” Only 58% knew that the Civil War was fought sometime between 1850 and 1900. Fully 60% were unable to say who was President at the time of the Korean War. The author of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” was identified as T.S. Eliot by only about 17% of those who took the 87-question test.
Lynne V. Cheney, chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, says the test shows that too many students are graduating from college without knowing “basic landmarks of history and thought.” True enough. No less true, and no less disturbing, is that large numbers of students are entering college having never been exposed to or having never grasped certain basic facts and ideas. It may be good news that 75% of those asked knew or--since it was a multiple choice test--correctly guessed that Columbus first landed in the Western Hemisphere before 1500. It’s dismal news that 25% didn’t know.
Cheney uses this latest poll to argue again that colleges should require all students to enroll in a core curriculum embracing 50 hours of study in five basic areas of knowledge: cultures and civilizations, including non-European civilizations; foreign languages; concepts of mathematics; the natural sciences; the social sciences. An increasing number of colleges, in fact, seem to be adopting or returning to that approach, often with variations of their own.
But surely it’s not necessary to wait until college before introducing young people to some of the ideas and skills the core curriculum offers. Most children spend a dozen years in the classroom before some of them go on to higher education. That is plenty of time to expose them more intensely to some of the more important things that happened in history, to some of the world’s great books, to what the sciences are all about. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” wrote Karl Marx. Except 23% of college seniors think the words are to be found in the Constitution of the United States. Clearly, there’s a lot of work to be done.
