Not only the public school system, but universities are failing to teach American history and civics.

Among college seniors, less than half--47.9%--correctly concluded that "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal" was from the Declaration of Independence. More than half did not know that the Bill of Rights prohibits the governmental establishment of an official religion, and "55.4 percent could not recognize Yorktown as the battle that brought the American Revolution to an end" (more than one quarter believing that it was the Civil War battle of Gettysburg that had ended the Revolution).

Of course, a lot of these things they should have been taught in high school, but weren't.

But they all hate Bush, and thats what counts.
Moonbat mode off\

More than half did not know that the Bill of Rights prohibits the governmental establishment of an official religion

That may have something to do with the way "theocracy" has been defined down in recent years, to where a big rock with numbers on it in Alabama was the Second Coming of the Taliban.

Of course, the Bill of Rights originally only restricted the *Federal Government* from establishing a religion. AIUI several of the states at that time had state religions. Notice that it says "Congress shall..." It was only at a much later date that the Bill of Rights was changed to applying to both the states as well as the federal government...

I recently got called as a Cub Scout leader, and we were working on the Citizen Award Badge, so I had us all read over the Bill of Rights and discuss it. I really wonder at times what parts of "shall make no law" or "shall not be infringed" is so difficult for so many politicians (on both the Left and the Right) to understand.

~Jon

My US history education was wiped out by "outcome based education" during the time I was to take it in high school. It's hard to teach when half the class is a month behind in its work, many on their Nth re-try of the first exam of the term. It was a shame since the teacher was such a historian... you could almost see him crying inside having to deal with such an idiotic system.

If life were a game we'd all be losing. It's very discouraging. Small communities used to hire a teacher that taught subjects up to Latin and Calculus. They knew their history. Today, public schools are a political tyranny you are forced to pay for and have little control over. I'm just glad my son will be done with it soon.

This is an obnoxious survey that says more about the starched, high-school-level mindset of those who commissioned it than it does about useful knowledge. The single most obnoxious thing about it is the way that they made universities compete with themselves. For example, Rhodes College looks much better than Harvard, because their students gained 11.6%, while those at Harvard only gained 1.9%. Only at the end does the report reveal that Harvard students did better than Rhodes students both as freshmen and as seniors. That way of ranking universities is a calculated insult to the best ones.

The larger problem, even if it isn't another calculated insult, is that most of the test targets exactly what good high school students memorize and regurgitate. It might be nice if every college graduate remembered exactly where the British surrendered to General Washington (and the French of course), but the truth is that there isn't anywhere to go with that historical datum. College students have moved on to study things like business profit; in fact the students surveyed gained 5% in their ability to define it. They generally gained the most on more conceptual questions, and questions more relevant to the present time.

But hey, I congratulate Rhodes College for its excellence as a performance high school. Unlike those losers at Michigan who study things like aerospace engineering.

Yuck. I just read the paper. It's crap.

Yes, American high-school and college students are woefully uninformed. But this "study" makes a bizarre, erroneous assumption and then uses it to derive a bogus statistic.

What the study *claims* to measure is improvement, and then (as Mike Johnson notes above) makes a big deal about the supposed percentage of improvement while glossing over the *absolute* levels of knowledge of the students (revealed in small print on the last page). But the survey doesn't really do that. It measures the education levels of freshmen and of seniors in a single year, and compares them. Contrary to Mr. du Pont's assertion, the study does *not* identify which colleges "added very much to students' knowledge of America's history or government" -- instead, it identifies colleges at which today's incoming freshmen are *better* educated than the freshmen of three years earlier!

Either Mr. du Pont understands this fallacy or he doesn't. Neither alternative reflects very highly on him.