Railing against I-Pods, blogs, sitcoms, DVDs, the Internet, and the general scourge of popular culture, Emory Professor of English Mark Bauerlein in the January 6 Chronicle of Higher Education provides a barrage of statistics to show that today’s youth are ignorant of history. But before Bauerlein dons sackcloth and ashes over Homer Simpson’s progeny, he would be well advised to do his own history homework first.

“Ignorance of U.S. History Shown by College Freshmen” trumpeted the New York Time’s headline on April 4, 1943, a day when the main story reported that General George Patton’s troops had overrun Erwin Rommel at Al-Guettar. Providing support for Allan Nevins’s claim that “young people are all too ignorant of American history,” the survey showed that a scant 6% of the 7000 college freshman could identify the 13 original colonies, while only 15% could place McKinley as president during the Spanish-American War. Less than a quarter could name two contributions made by either Abraham Lincoln or Thomas Jefferson.

Often, students were simply confused. Abraham Lincoln “emaciated the slaves” and, as first president, was father of the Constitution. One graduate of an eastern high school, responding to a question about the system of checks and balances, claimed that Congress “has the right to veto bills that the President wishes to be passed.” According to students, the United States expanded territorially by purchasing Alaska from the Dutch, the Philippines from Great Britain, Louisiana from Sweden, and Hawaii from Norway. A Times editorial excoriated these “appallingly ignorant” youth. “Either the college freshman, recently out of high school, were poorly prepared on the secondary level,” surmised Times reporter Benjamin Fine, “or they had forgotten what they learned about United States history.” And, of course, there were no I-Pods to kick around back in 1943.

Similar hand wringing came into fashion just in time for the nation’s Bicentennial, this time with Bernard Bailyn doing the Simon-says. With the aid of the Educational Testing Service (ETS), the Times surveyed nearly two thousand freshmen on 194 college campuses. On May 2, 1976 the results rained down on the bicentennial parade: “Times Test Shows knowledge of American History Limited.”

The fact is that teenagers have never done well on the tests that Professor Bauerlein uses to worry himself into a tizzy. Fortunately we can take solace in the fact that historical knowledge, to use Michael Schudson’s apt phrase, “seeps into the cultural pores” even if such knowledge is not “readily retrievable by seventeen-year-olds answering a quiz” (see Schudson’s Watergate in American Life, Basic Books 1992). Large-scale tests may tell us what we already know: that young people (and most adults) become confused staring down ETS’s version of historical knowledge. But to assume that multiple-choice tests constitute the alpha and omega of historical knowledge thwarts any serious investigation of American intellectual life and culture.

Bauerlein puts great faith in the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) examinations in history. But as I have shown elsewhere (Journal of American History, “Crazy for History,” March 2004), the NAEP is rigged. Items that students overwhelmingly get right during the pilot phase of the exam are eliminated from the item bank in favor of those that create a statistical “spread” in the distribution. So don’t hold your breath, Professor Bauerlein. No matter how many I-Pods you succeed in decommissioning, you won’t wake up to a headline that says, “US Students Score Well on New History Test.” The outcome of such tests is as fixed as a Vegas slot machine. In this rare case, history does repeat itself

In that spirit, let me end with a test question of my own:
Identify the source of the following characterization of student knowledge: “Surely a grade of 33 in 100 on the simplest and most obvious facts of American history is not a record in which any high school can take pride.”

Is this yet another indictment of today’s OC-addled, Eminem intoxicated, “tight-chill-dude” blathering students? Sorry. What about those zoned-out hippies from 60s? Wrong again. No, we would have to go all the way back to 1917, when the first “objective” history test was given to American high school and college students, for the source of this quotation. And think for a moment who went to high school and college in Texas in 1917.

Instead of blaming students, maybe it is time for us -- as teachers -- to rethink our own broken methods. Now that’s something to put out on a Pod-cast.