What, me worry?

OPINION:

The near illiteracy of many young Americans on matters of basic cultural and civic import is well known. But hearing it afresh can be jarring. So it is reading “Still at Risk,” a new report from author Frederick Hess and researchers at the education nonprofit Common Core, available at www.commoncore.org. Surveying 1,200 high-school students on civics, history and literature, the researchers found the following troubling indicators of the basic knowledge which many young people lack. Keep in mind, these were multiple-choice questions:

• Half of high-school students could not say what the Renaissance was.

• Only two-thirds know that freedom of speech and freedom of religion are guaranteed in the Bill of Rights.

•25 percent could not identify Adolf Hitler. Ten percent said Hitler was a munitions manufacturer, perhaps confusing the infamous Nazi with Alfred Nobel, the Swedish chemist and arms manufacturer.

• Fewer than half can place the Civil War in the half-century 1850-1900.

• More than a quarter did not know that the Watergate investigations resulted in President Nixon’s resignation.

• 30 percent did not know that John F. Kennedy said: “And so my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”

• Only 52 percent knew that the subject of George Orwell’s classic novel “1984” is a totalitarian society which quashes individualism.

• 26 percent thought Christopher Columbus sailed to the New World after 1750.

Now, there exists a silver lining to these clouds: Students do seem to retain what schools bother to teach them, and certainly do retain the civic and cultural knowledge which popular culture happens to convey. For instance:

• 97 percent know that Martin Luther King Jr. made the famous “I have a dream” speech.

• 87 percent know that Thomas Jefferson is the primary author of the Declaration of Independence.

• 82 percent identified Abraham Lincoln as the issuer of the Emancipation Proclamation.

• 79 percent know that Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” is a story of two young children and racial inequality in the American South.

• 88 percent know that the bombing of Pearl Harbor precipitated U.S. entry into World War II.

These positives in today’s Alfred E. Neuman school of American cultural literacy, in which our schools take the “What, me worry?” attitude, do not make up for the very troubling ignorance of young people. But they surely suggest that the deficiency lies less with young people, who pick up the knowledge to which they are exposed, but rather our educational institutions, which fail them far too often.