Someone (some thing?) once said, “sharing is caring,” so I share a great article by Nick Paumgarten in last week’s New Yorker. Everyone’s up in arms that kids today don’t know history. But apparently kids NEVER knew history. A Stanford professor shared: “...the first large-scale proficiency study—of Texas students, in 1915-16—demonstrated that many couldn’t tell Thomas Jefferson from Jefferson Davis or 1492 from 1776. A 1943 survey of seven thousand college freshmen found that, among other things, only six per cent of them could name the original thirteen colonies. “Appallingly ignorant,” the Times harrumphed, as it would again in the face of another dismal showing, in 1976. It’s our “amnesia of past ignorance.” Maybe we’re hopeless, though I hope not. And aren’t you proud of me for not just bashing Texas for this?
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2011/06/27/110627ta_talk_paumgarten#ixzz1QWVYgxX0