This is easily one of the best books I’ve read this year. In chapter 1, the author cites statistic after statistic showing that even though the current generation have been in school longer than previous generations, they are not necessarily smarter. At least when it comes to factual knowledge.
Most young Americans possess little of the knowledge that makes for an informed citizen, and too few of them master the skills needed to negotiate an information-heavy, communication-based society and economy. Furthermore, they avoid the resources and media that might enlighten them and boost their talents. An anti-intellectual outlook prevails in their leisure lives, squashing the lessons of school, and instead of producing a knowledgeable and querulous young mind, the youth culture of American society yields an adolescent consumer enmeshed in juvenile matters and secluded from adult realities. The meager findings force the issue as researchers form an inescapable judgment, one that will dismay anyone who cares about the health of U.S. democracy and the intelligence of U.S. culture. The insulated mindset of individuals who know precious little history and civics and never read a book or visit a museum is fast becoming a common, shame-free condition. The clueless youths Leno stops on the street aren't so different from a significant and rising portion of teens and young adults, the future of our country.
That sounds like an alarmist claim, and the fact that the average 18-year-old cannot name his mayor, congressman, or senator, or remember the last book he read, or identify Egypt on a map seems impossible. But the results are in, and they keep accumulating. Here are examples, broken down by discipline.
History. Students reaching their senior year in high school have passed through several semesters of social studies and history, but few of them remember the significant events, figures, and texts. On the 2001 NAEP history exam, the majority of high school seniors, 57 percent, scored “below basic,” “basic” being defined as partial mastery of prerequisite knowledge and skills that allow for proficient work at a selected grade level. Only 1 percent reached “advanced.” (The NAEP has four scores: Advanced, Proficient, Basic, and Below Basic.) Incredibly, 52 percent of them chose Germany, Japan, or Italy over the Soviet Union as a U.S. ally in World War II. The previous time the history exam was administered—in 1994—the exact same numbers came up for seniors, 57 percent at “below basic” and 1 percent at “advanced.” Younger test takers performed better, and showed some progress from test to test. In 1994, fourth-graders stood at only 36 percent below basic, and in 2001 they lowered the number to 33 percent. In 2006, NAEP administered the History exam to 29,000 fourth-, eighth-, and twelfth-graders, and a mild improvement emerged. For twelfth-graders, the “below basic” tally dropped four points to 53 percent, and for eighth-graders it dropped from 38 to 35 percent, although both groups remain at 1 percent in “advanced,” and only 12 percent of the older students fall into “proficient.” More than one-third (37 percent) of twelfth-graders did not know that the 1962 Soviet-U.S. dispute arose over missiles in Cuba. Two-thirds of high school seniors couldn’t explain a photo of a theater whose portal reads “COLORED ENTRANCE.”
Diane Ravitch, education professor at NYU and former member of the NAEP governing board, called the 2001 results “truly abysmal” and worried about a voting bloc coming of age with so little awareness of American history. Many believe that college can remedy the deficit, but the findings of another study belie their hope. Commissioned by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, Losing America’s Memory: Historical Illiteracy in the 21st Century (2000) reported the findings of a commissioned survey aimed at measuring the factual historical knowledge of seniors at the top 55 colleges in the country. Many of the questions were drawn from the NAEP high school exam, and the results were astonishing. Only 19 percent of the subjects scored a grade of C or higher. A mere 29 percent knew hat “Reconstruction” refers to, only one-third recognized the American general at Yorktown, and less than one-fourth identified James Madison as the “father of the Constitution.”
The feeble scores on these tests emerge despite the fact that young people receive more exposure to history in popular culture than ever before, for instance, best-selling books such as Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit: An American Legend and John Adams by David McCullough, movies such as Braveheart and Troy and Marie Antoinette, the History Channel and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and Wikipedia. Many mass entertainments have historical content, however much the facts get skewed. And yet, if teens and young adults consume them, they don’t retain them as history. In spite of ubiquitous injunctions to know the past by George Will, Alex Trebek, Black History Month, Holocaust survivors, Smithsonian magazine, and so on, the historical imagination of most young people extends not much further than the episodes in their own lives.
Civics. In 1999, according to the U.S. Department of Education, more than two-thirds of ninth-graders studied the Constitution, while fully 88 percent of twelfth-graders took a course that “required them to pay attention to government issues” (see What Democracy Means to Ninth-Graders). As they pass through high school and college, too, they volunteer in strong numbers. Despite the schooling and the activism, however, civic learning doesn’t stick. In a 1998 survey of teenagers by the National Constitution Center, only 41 percent could name the three branches of government (in the same survey, 59 percent identified the Three Stooges by name). In a 2003 survey on the First Amendment commissioned by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, only one in 50 college students named the first right guaranteed in the amendment, and one out of four did not know any freedom protected by it. In a 2003 study sponsored by the National Conference of State Legislatures entitled Citizenship: A Challenge for All Generations, barely half of the 15- to 26-year-olds queried agreed that “paying attention to government and politics” is important to good citizenship, and only two-thirds considered voting a meaningful act. While 64 percent knew the name of the latest “American Idol,” only 10 percent could identify the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Only one-third knew which party controlled the state legislature, and only 40 percent knew which party controlled Congress.
In the 2004 National Election Study, a mere 28 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds correctly identified William H. Rehnquist as the chief justice of the United States, and one-quarter of them could not identify Dick Cheney as vice president. A July 2006 Pew Research Center report on newspaper readership found that only 26 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds could name Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State, and only 15 percent knew that Vladimir Putin was the president of Russia. On the 2006 NAEP Civics exam, only 27 percent of twelfth-graders reached proficiency, and 34 percent of them scored “below basic.” Since 2004, the Knight Foundation has funded “Future of the First Amendment” surveys of high school students, and in the last round nearly three-fourths of them “don’t know how they feel about the First Amendment, or take it for granted.”
In civics, too, higher education doesn’t guarantee any improvement. In September 2006, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute presented a report entitled The Coming Crisis in Citizenship: Higher Education’s Failure to Teach America’s History and Institutions. The project tested more than 14,000 freshmen and seniors at 50 colleges across the country in American history, government, foreign relations, and the market economy, with questions on topics such as separation of church and state, federalism, women’s suffrage, the Bill of Rights, and Martin Luther King. Once again, the numbers were discouraging. The respondents came from Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Stanford as well as lesser-known institutions such as West Georgia College, Eastern Kentucky, and Appalachian State. The average score for a freshman was an F—51.7 percent. And how much did seniors add to the score? A measly 1.5 percentage points—still an F. With both class levels measured, the ISI study also allowed for assessments of how much progress students made at each institution. At Harvard, freshmen scored 67.8 percent, seniors 69.7 percent, a minuscule gain after $200,000 in tuition fees. At Berkeley, the students actually regressed, going from 60.4 percent in their first year to 54.8 in their last year.
Given the dilution of college curricula and the attitudes expressed in the Citizenship study, we shouldn’t be surprised that college students score so feebly and tread water during their time on campus. A statistic from the American Freshman Survey, an annual project of the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA (sample size, approximately 250,000), echoes the civic apathy. In 1966, the survey tabulated 60 percent of first-year students who considered it “very important” to keep up with political affairs. In 2005, that figure plummeted to 36 percent, notwithstanding 9/11, the Iraq war, and the upcoming election. No wonder the Executive Summary of the State Legislatures report opened with a blunt indictment: “This public opinion survey shows that young people do not understand the ideals of citizenship, they are disengaged from the political process, they lack the knowledge necessary for effective self-government, and their appreciation and support of American democracy is limited.”
Math/Science/Technology. “The United States is in a fierce contest with other nations to remain the world’s scientific leader.” That’s the opening sentence of Tapping America’s Potential: The Education for Innovation Initiative, a 2005 report by the Business Roundtable. The premise appears regularly in discussions of the future of U.S. competitiveness in the international arena, and so does a corollary to it: to preserve its economic and military superiority in the world, America must sustain a flowing pipeline of able math, science, and engineering graduates. Politicians are quick to respond. In his 2006 State of the State address, New York governor George Pataki called for more magnet schools focused on math and science, and for free tuition at SUNY and CUNY campuses for students majoring in those subjects. In May 2006, the U.S. House Committee on Science introduced three bills designed to bolster math and science education, with Chairman Sherwood Boehlert asserting, “As a nation, we must do everything possible to remain competitive, and that starts with ensuring that we have the best scientists and engineers in the world.”
Young Americans haven’t answered the call, though. According to the National Science Board, engineering degrees awarded in the United States have dropped 20 percent since 1985. Of the more than 1.1 million high school seniors in the class of 2002 who took the ACT test, less than 6 percent planned to study engineering, a steep drop from the nearly 9 percent who declared an engineering major a decade earlier. The 2006 American Freshman Survey found that only 0.5 percent of first-year students intended to major in physics, 0.8 percent in math, and 1.2 percent in chemistry, although engineering improved to 8 percent.
Set alongside rival nations, the numbers look worse. While six million Chinese students tried to win a place in the Intel Science and Engineering Fair, only 65,000 U.S. students did, a ratio of 92 to 1. American universities still have the best engineering programs in the world, but more than 50 percent of the doctorates they grant go to foreign students. At the going rate, in a few years 90 percent of all scientists and engineers in the world will reside in Asia.
The low interest students have in math and science is reflected in their knowledge and skills. On the 2005 NAEP science exam for twelfth-graders, the average score was 147, a drop of three points since 1996. Nearly half of the test takers—46 percent—didn’t reach the “basic” threshold, and only 2 percent reached “advanced.” Math scores were better, but not by much. NAEP results from 2004 showed that fourth-graders improved significantly over the previous decades, but twelfth-graders made no gains at all, even though the number of them taking calculus nearly tripled from 1978 to 2004 and the number taking second-year algebra rose from 37 percent to 53 percent. Indeed, from 1978 to 2004 the percentage of students reporting doing math homework “often” jumped from 59 percent to 73 percent, but still, no improvement happened.
Again, international comparisons darken the picture. Two major ongoing projects provide the data, the Trends in International Math and Science Study (TIMSS) and the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The TIMSS exam tests nine- and 13-year-olds on their curricular knowledge (geometry and algebra, for example). In 2003, with 51 countries participating, nine-year-olds did well, ranking eighth among countries tested. Likewise, 13-year-olds beat the international average, but they slid down the rankings six slots to #14, falling behind Lithuania, Latvia, and the Russian Federation. The PISA findings were worse. In 2003, PISA tested 15-year-olds in 42 countries in math and science (sample size: 4,500-10,000 per country), emphasizing the application of concepts to real-life problems. Fully 26 nations scored significantly higher than the United States, including not only the expected ones (Hong Kong, Finland, and Korea topped the list), but Canada, the Slovak Republic, Poland, and Australia, too. Given the general NAEP Jindings that show twelfth-graders sliding down the achievement scale, we may assume that if TIMSS and PISA tested older teens, the United States would appear even worse in international comparisons.
Fine Arts. It is hard to compile data on how much teens and young adults know about the fine arts, but we can determine their attraction to different art forms. The 2002 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (National Endowment for the Arts) charted several exposures over the preceding 12 months to record the bare presence of the fine arts in individuals’ lives. Except for people 75 and older, 18- to 24-year -olds emerged with the lowest rates of all age groups. Only one in 10 attended a jazz performance, and one in 12 attended a classical music performance. Only 2.6 percent of them saw a ballet, 11.4 percent a play. Less than one in four (23.7 percent) stepped inside a museum or gallery during the previous year, one in 40 played a classical music instrument, and one in 20 sang in a choir. Compared with findings from 1982 and 1992, the 2002 results showed performing arts attendance by 18- to 24-year-olds dropping in every art form included. The decline took place, moreover, at the same time that the opportunity to experience the arts rose. According to the Census Bureau, the number of museums in the United States jumped from 3,600 in Year 2000 to 4,700 in 2003, and performance arts companies went from 19,300 to 27,400. Nevertheless, the younger audiences shrank.
It wasn’t because young adults didn’t have time to enjoy the arts. According to the 2005 Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance (Centers for Disease Control), 37 percent of high school students watch three or more hours of television per day. For college students the numbers may be higher. In 2005, Nielsen Media Research reported that the average college student watches 3 hours, 41 minutes of television each day. “It was a little more than I expected,” a Nielsen executive stated, and a little more than professors care to see. Clearly, students love entertainment, but not of the fine arts kind. The 2006 National Survey of Student Engagement (Indiana University) reported that fully 27 percent of first-year students “never” attended an art exhibit, gallery, play, dance, or other theater performance, and 45 percent only “sometimes.” The rate for seniors, who had three extra years on campus to cultivate their tastes: 45 percent “sometimes,” the same as the freshmen, but the “never” rate actually rose a dismaying four points……
