"Don't know much about history..."

The teaching of US History and civics is failing. High schools do it poorly [classes in politics and government are seldom required], and colleges do nothing to rectify the ignorance. From USA Today:

Students don't know much about history, and colleges aren't adding enough to their civic literacy, says a report out today.

The study from the non-profit Intercollegiate Studies Institute shows that less than half of college seniors knew that Yorktown was the battle that ended the American Revolution or that NATO was formed to resist Soviet expansion. Overall, freshmen averaged 50.4% on a wide-ranging civic literacy test; seniors averaged 54.2%, both failing scores if translated to grades.

Some selected specifics:

• Harvard seniors had the highest average at 69.6%, 5.97 points higher than its freshmen but still a D+. A Harvard senior posted the only perfect score.
• ....Yale, with the highest-scoring freshmen (68.94%), along with Princeton, Duke and Cornell, were among eight schools with freshmen outscoring seniors.
• "Several of the colleges at the lower end of our survey are some of the most prestigious in the country, with average tuition, room and board somewhere north of $40,000 a year," ....

One of the responses is to indict high schools:

Still, "in many cases, these students are coming from high schools where the subject matter has already been covered," notes Tony Pals of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. "It would be a waste of their tuition dollars to sit through the courses again."

...William Galston, Brookings Institution senior fellow of governance studies....: "Less is being expected of secondary and post-secondary education in the way of civic education, and because less is expected, less is achieved," he says.

You can take the test here. As a former history and politics teacher I ought to have done well, and I did - my score was 93.33%, A- on the scale I used to use. I missed four questions - three of them having to do with economics: Questions #39, #53, #58 and #60. Missing even those is embarrassing.

College students struggle on history test - USATODAY.com