Nick Paumgarten puts the latest numbers from the National Assessment of Educational Progress in perspective:
[T]he first large-scale proficiency study—of Texas students, in 1915-16—demonstrated that many couldn’t tell Thomas Jefferson from Jefferson Davis or 1492 from 1776. A 1943 survey of seven thousand college freshmen found that, among other things, only six per cent of them could name the original thirteen colonies. “Appallingly ignorant,” the Times harrumphed, as it would again in the face of another dismal showing, in 1976. … The NAEP results through more than four decades have been consistently mediocre, which may prove nothing except, as [Sam Wineburg, a professor of education and history at Stanford] wrote in 2004, “our amnesia of past ignorance.”
(Image by Chad Hagen from the series Anatomics)
The Dish 