Failing Civics

Take the American Civics Literacy Test and compare your score with both freshmen and graduating seniors at America’s colleges.

The Anchoress inspired me to take the test today. I matched her score of 56 out of 60, or 93%. Oh well, you can’t know everything.

But then I didn’t go to Harvard where the graduating seniors had a mean score of 69.56%, which was the highest of all the schools.

The test is administered by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute to 14,000 freshmen and seniors at 50 colleges and universities. It tests American history, political thought, market economy, and international relations.

The average senior failed all four subjects, scoring less than 60% in each. Among the findings:

• Seniors do not know basic facts of American history. Only 45.9% know that Yorktown was the battle that ended the American Revolution.
  
  
• Seniors do not know the basic timeline of American history. Only 47.7% know that Fort Sumter came before Gettysburg and that Gettysburg came before Appomattox.
  
  
• Seniors do not know America’s founding documents. Only 45.9% know that the line “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” comes from the Declaration of Independence.
  
  
• Seniors do not know the rudiments of America’s historical relations with the world. Only 42.7% know that NATO was formed to resist Soviet expansion.

The results tend to be worse in the most prestigious universities.

Colleges that do well in popular rankings typically do not do well in advancing civic knowledge.

• Generally, the higher U.S. News & World Report ranks a college, the lower it ranks here in civic learning. At four colleges U.S. News ranked in its top 12 (Cornell, Yale, Duke, and Princeton), seniors scored lower than freshmen. These colleges are elite centers of “negative learning.” Cornell was the third-worst performer last year and the worst this year.
  
  
• Surveyed colleges ranked by Barron’s imparted only about one-third the civic learning of colleges overlooked by Barron’s.

How do you “unteach” history and civics to college students? I don’t think it’s very hard. One method would be simply to ignore those subjects entirely and rely on the students to forget what they have learned. Another would be to fill the students’ heads with enough mumbo-jumbo that they can no longer discern the facts. Another would be to design a curriculum around how students “feel” about civics and history. Another would be to teach history only as it relates to gender and sexual preferences. . . .

We could go on.