Reply to It’s Not Just Math and Reading: U.S. History Scores for 8th Graders Plunge

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

I recall watching, I think Jay Leno's show, where they went out onto the streets and asked random people simple US history questions, like when was WWII or the Vietnam war. The answers were sadly funny.
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Just pointing out the obvious: they are showing you the dumbest ones and leaving the rest of the footage on the cutting room floor. Their goal is to show you the dumbest so you can feel superior and laugh at how stupid people are. It's nothing you can regard as representative of society in general. [/quote]
according to that article,  1 in 3 cannot pass a US citizenship test, and those tests actually leave out a lot of actual US history.[/quote]

There is a lot of daylight between the U.S. citizenship test and the type of questions they'd ask on Leno. And basically any test you'd care to reference necessarily leaves out more U.S. History than it includes. History is vast. [/quote]
basic history questions like, "when was WWII or civil war"?   They weren't asking hard questions. That's what made it sadly funny.

No, I did not go to an elite school. I went to a no name state u.

IMO, it's a symptom of schools letting kids matriculate without having basic knowledge, and that includes math, reading and history. And this has been going on for decades.[/quote]

The emphasis on dates always bugged me. Knowing the chronology -- the relationship of one event to another -- always seemed more relevant than knowing 1945 versus 1932 or  whatever.

Now that you mention the Civil War, however, I agree that the number of people who don't know the basic cause of the civil war -- southern whites committing treason in defense of slavery -- is nuts. They'll say it was because of tariffs or Lincoln's desire to be a tyrant or some nonsense. [/quote]

For US history, I don't think it's a big ask for kids to know 1776, 1787, 1861-65, 1929, and 1941-45[/quote]

1619, 1870, and 1920 are probably just as significant. [/quote]

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