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Published by the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development
With support fram the WK. Kellogg Foundation and Sid W Richardson Foundation

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HISTORICAL ILLITERACY IN THE COMMUNITY COLLEGE

Recently there has been a developing concern regarding the historical ignorance and awareness of college
students. Broadly and simply defined, historical illiteracy is the lack of familiarity with the past. As
teachers, we should address the importance and implications of historical illiteracy, try to ascertain a "profile
of students," and develop working exercises to enhance the students’ ability to recognize not only historical
facts, but their relevance in today’s world.

Except for English literature, history is considered to be the most literary of the academic disciplines. E.D.
Hirsch, in his recent work Cultural Literacy, has stressed that because of the lack of historical familiarity
among, students, there is the widespread inability to understand or identify basic references and metaphors.
The study of history is not just the mundane recitation of facts; it is the enlightenment of students regarding
ideologies, socioeconomic and political structures, and a fundamental grasp of not only American history but
of Western and non-Western development, as well. Many of us have had European and Asian pupils in our
classrooms who seemed to possess a greater knowledge of American historical development and government
than our own students. A former President and avid student of history, Harry S. Truman once insisted:
"The only thing new in this world is the history you don’t know." Perhaps that is just a quaint
overstatement by a lover of the discipline. But there is little doubt about the growing awareness and
concern over the emergence of historical amnesia among American students. Before we suggest some
exercises to address the problem, let us propose a tentative profile of "historically illiterate students."

Studying Historical Illiteracy in Students

Our study of over 300 college students was designed to identify factors that differentiate those who do not
know much of their heritage from those who do. Students whom we labeled as culturally illiterate scored
lower than the 54th percentile on a fairly easy matching quiz that tested American, world, and intellectual
history.

The study gave us many interesting and surprising results. Students often could not answer even simple
historical questions. For example, we found that many students did not know U.S. Grant from Robert E.
Lee or Jefferson Davis. Many confused Benjamin Franklin with Thomas Edison, and a great number of
students did not recognize important world leaders of the past such as Gandhi, Churchill, Mao, or Caesar.
Another concern is that students seemed unfamiliar with major western intellectuals: they confused Karl
Marx with Adam Smith, or Einstein with Newton. A greater alarm was raised when respondents obviously
did not know an answer and would give a name that was totally unrelated: for instance, Sam Donaldson,
the correspondent, was often mistaken for Senator Joseph McCarthy.

In addition, we found "illiterate" students to have special qualities in common that set them apart from
those in the "high score" group. Our results show that the groups differed significantly on attitudes;
students in the low group were more than twice as likely to be alienated and have a lower self-esteem than
students who scored well on our quiz. Furthermore, this group reported to be more socially isolated, as
well. This may indicate that persons who do not have many social outlets have difficulty structuring time in
an historical sense and have few social and psychological opportunities to develop an interest in history.
Finally, students who hold a narrow, closed-minded view of nationalism were three times more likely to
score low on the quiz.

In addition, we identified other background factors associated with historical illiteracy. Persons 22 years
of age and younger were three times more likely to score low than persons 30 and over. Male respondents
were 2.5 times more likely to record a high score than female. Interestingly, we found that parents’
educational background had no effect on their children’s knowledge of history.

A last and important finding is that students who have completed at least one history class in college
were 2.3 times more likely to be aware of significant historical events. This finding underscores the
importance of education, of a familiarity with the world in which we live.

 

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Ao} Community College Leadership Program, The University of Texas at Austin, EDB 348, Austin, Texas 78712