This is a post from my previous blog:
World magazine ran a story called "The Conservationist" in their January 29, 2005 issue that spoke about the direction the National Endowment for the Humanities is headed under Director Bruce Cole. World said that under his leadership the agency "has returned to the role of preserving America's heritage."
At the end of this article, World cites recently released statistics from the NEH about what Americans believe about our heritage. If the statistics are true, then we are in big trouble. According to the NEH:
51 percent of American high-school students think Germany, Japan, or Italy was an ally of the United States during World War II.
Wouldn't you like to know which countries these students actually believe we fought against? I wonder if Hitler or Pearl Harbor would ring a bell?
40 percent of seniors at America's top 55 colleges do not know within 50 years when the Civil War took place.
How is this possible? Couldn't they have ruled out the 1700's since we didn't become a republic until late in the century? And surely they knew that the Civil War didn't occur in the 1900's. So, which century is left? Just a simple guess of somewhere in the middle of the 1800's would have put them within 50 years.
56 percent of seniors at America's top 55 colleges do not know that Abraham Lincoln was the president during the Civil War.
Wouldn't you like to know who they think the president was during the Civil War?
40 percent of seniors at America's top 55 colleges do not know that the document establishing the separation of powers in our government is the U.S. Constitution.
What other document has the authority to establish power in our government?
69 percent of voting-age Americans think that Karl Marx's principle of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" either is (35 percent) or might be (34 percent) a quotation from the U.S. Constitution.
No wonder Marxism runs rampant in both political parties and on far too many college campuses. Sixty-nine percent of voting-age Americans actually believe that the underlying principle of Marxism is found in our Constitution. Doesn't anybody actually read the document any more?
Zero percent of America's top 55 colleges have an American history requirement.
As telling as this is, shouldn't students already know the basics of American history by the time they reach college? Shouldn't they have read the Constitution? Shouldn't they have some idea what a democratic republic is in contrast to Marxism?
And how ironic is it that taxpayers are funding a department like the NEH to tell us that our students have no concept of their heritage while at the same time our government is failing miserably to educate our students?
