Why did the United States enter the Korean War?
Only 14 percent of American 12th-graders were able to answer this fundamental historical question, according to the U.S. Department of Education's National Assessment of Education Progress for U.S. history, released in May. A dismal 47 percent of 12th-grade students demonstrated at least "basic" understanding of American history in the assessment. Thirteen and one percent of high school seniors performed at "proficient" and "advanced" levels, respectively.
And here is the most ridiculous part: Despite the test showing students a photograph of a wall being torn down with the caption "Berlin 1989," one-third of 12th-graders were unable to identify the monumental event and its significance in American foreign policy.
In the words of tennis great Jon McEnroe, "You cannot be serious."
College-bound American students are illiterate in history. Not only does public education in the United States take the wrong approach to teaching history, it does not even emphasize the real personal value of learning the subject.
For too many students, history class has been about the tedious memorization of dates, names, and places and booting them up on a Scantron standardized test sheet. And days after feverish studying, students cannot even recall the material anymore. Wilson's Fourteen Points quickly reduces to Wilson's Two or Three Points.
The misguided worship of the Scantron and memorization turns students off to history. "A lot of people in higher education think that the obsessive focus on standardized testing at the K-12 level, and increasingly at the higher-ed level, is exacerbating exactly [the] problem [seen in the Assessment's findings]," Association of American Colleges and Universities spokesman Deborah Humphreys told the Chronicle of Higher Education this month.
High school kids do not grasp the practical worth of "learning from the mistakes of the past" and the grandiose notion that "those who do not know their history are doomed to repeat it." To be honest, very few students foresee themselves negotiating with Hitler over the annexation of the Sudetenland in the near future.
Living in the age of Wikipedia, few students find any real value in the vain memorization that the Mr. Feeneys of the world require. Down the road, no one sitting in a cubicle will be told, "Tell the boss the significance of John Brown's 1859 raid on Harper's Ferry -- or you are fired."
In the face of this student apathy, public education has foolishly treated history as a second-class subject. The No Child Left Behind law does not even require the teaching of history, as it does for math and science. Students' mastery of history steadily dropped off in the more career-focused later years of their education. Compared to the 47 percent of 12th-graders scoring "basic" in history, 65 percent of 8th-graders and 70 percent of 4th-graders reached the same level, which demonstrates the decreasing emphasis on teaching history in high schools. The federal government apparently does not believe that history teaches real world skills like the "hard" sciences do.
While biology courses train students to operate the same electrophoresis gels used at the National Institutes of Health, and economics majors study Wall Street quantitative analyses, learning history should promote refined writing, research and analytical skills -- not mere memorization of facts. These skills are just as marketable in the real world than any math, science and economics savvy.
This is why college history majors regularly fill the job vacancies of K Street, Madison Avenue and beyond and do not have to rely on "Jeopardy!" winnings to secure their financial futures. Above all, consulting firms, law practices and business conglomerates seek sharp minds. Absorbing the "who, what, where and when" of history comes naturally with writing, research and analyzing.
Beyond mindless memorization and filling in bubbles with No. 2 pencils, American educators need to stress the tangible career skills gained through studying history and design their courses to develop those lucrative talents. In doing so, students will become more engaged and reap more concrete benefits for their future. And after that, as they say, the rest is history.
