Don’t know much about history
American students don't know much about their country's history, according to results of a nationwide test released last month. Most fourth graders couldn't say why Abraham Lincoln was important. Only 2 percent of high school seniors could name the social problem that the Supreme Court addressed in Brown v. Board of Education.
Some blame the poor results on the No Child Left Behind curriculum, which favors reading, math and science over history. Some say poor teachers are to blame. Others say the problem is with the test, whose multiple-choice answers include "distracters," designed to trip students up. Still others say—pointing to previous test results—that Americans have never known much about history.
Whatever their relative knowledge of history, Americans have never had more opportunity to learn about it than they do now. John Lukacs in The Future of History points to the rise of history TV channels, the proliferation of documentary films and the growth of local historical societies. Since 1960, history books have sold better than novels. The nation has an abundance of historians who write well and professional writers who are good at historical research. We live in a time, says Lukacs, "when many people know less history than their forebears may have known but when more people are interested in history than probably ever before."
