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Ignorance of history
The New Hampshire Union Leader has an appalling report on students' historical ignorance.
"More than half of college seniors could not identify the correct century in which the Jamestown colony was founded or name the battle that ended the American Revolution. Truly frightening, more than half also did not know that the Bill of Rights forbids the federal government from establishing a national religion.
These are college seniors. Among the institutions whose students were surveyed: Dartmouth, Yale, Harvard, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Michigan."
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Funny, but wasn't a "liberal" education at one time considered to be a "well rounded" knowledge of history, philosophy, and rhetoric? And now a "liberal" education is essentially indoctrination into the present political views of a small subset of society that wishes to diminish knowledge of its past failures? Our country was founded by people who believed that a knowledge of history was critical to an informed political debate. The irony that quality the political debate has fallen in direct proportion to knowledge of how policies and structures of the past have worked should be noted and lamented.
Reminds me of a thread over at the Volokh Conspiracy about The Simpsons and the First Amendment.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
--Thomas Jefferson